??? It was a fairly powerful handheld electromagnet
designed to pick up metal shavings and the like. This individual from
engineering tossed a few dozen nails on the ground, pointed the magnet at them, and
turned it on.
The device worked well; the nails flew to the magnet. Unfortunately, the individual
pointed the magnet indirectly at the cabinet holding the backup tapes.
The Result
Fortunately, there was no destruction to either the Windows servers or the mid-range
systems. The only items damaged by the magnet were the tapes in the storage cabinet.
Essentially, all of the tapes were wiped clean by the magnet.
This IT department was extremely lucky. For one month, everyone held their breath
as the tape library was reconstructed with current data. If, at any point, someone had
requested a file from an older tape (which was actually quite common in this organization),
they would have had to say, ???Sorry, it??™s gone.??? Given that most of the requests were
from executives, the ???sorry??? response would not have gone over well.
I??™mhappy to say that no harm ever came from this, and a number of people learned
about the frailty of magnetic media.
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