Announcing the Master of Data Disaster Contest!

Ever had a data disaster? A really bad one even? Well let’s hear it! This month we’re having a contest to see who has the worst data disaster and disaster recovery stories. We’ve all been there; something crashes, you scramble to get it back up, stuff is missing, chaos ensues, heads roll, hellfire, brimstone, etc etc. It happens to everyone sooner or later! And if misery loves company, let’s all groan at each other’s stories and see who has the worst!

THE RULES

1. You may submit your tale of woe through our Google+ page, via email, on Spiceworks, or via LinkedIn or Twitter. However you enter, make sure we have a good way to get in touch with you in case you win!
2. You will receive extra style points for submissions that use visuals or audio.
3. Your entry may be as long or as short as you like, but it should focus on what happened when you lost your data, what data you lost, and how long it took to recover.
4. More than one person from a company may enter, but only a single winner will be announced.
5. If your entry includes the word “bro,” it will automatically be disqualified, bro.
6. By sending us your entry, you’re saying, “Hey Spanning, it’s cool if you post this on your blog later.” However, if you’d like for us not to use your full name or your company’s name, we’re happy to use initials – just let us know!
7. The incident does not have to be something that happened to you directly at your current job; it can be a thing that you heard about from a buddy or something that happened at a past job. It should be factual though.
8. A winner will be announced on Tuesday, February 26, 2013. We can’t promise a tickertape parade, but we have our tickertape guy on it to see what he can do.

OK, now you’ve read the rules, you have a dozen ideas for entries, but you’re thinking, “Wait! Why should I do this? What’s the prize?”

THE PRIZE

The prize is that we will cater a lunch for your department or office from the restaurant of your choice, and then everyone will be high-fiving you for the rest of the day and saying, “Thanks for winning that contest! My tummy is full of goodness, and someone should probably give you a raise just for being you!” And then they high-five you some more and everyone starts singing songs that they’ve written about you, and a flash mob will probably break out with a choreographed dance number – it’s going to be pretty sweet.

THE INSPIRATION

In case you’re not inspired yet, here are a couple of stories from our Spanning staff to get your data disaster juices flowing:

“A relative of mine runs an online sales and marketing business.  They keep all of their customer contact and shipping information in a local copy of Quickbooks.  They would manually copy over what they thought was the backup to a thumb drive.  Well, not once, but twice they had a hard disk fail.  In both cases, their “backup” turned out to be some install files for Quickbooks, not the actual data file(s).  So, they had to (and still are, after several months) rebuilding their customer records by hand from paper copies. ” -Mike “At a place I used to work, we got an email saying that some servers had gone down. No one had regular email back up and running for 3 whole days. It was awful – the operations team couldn’t reply to client emails because they weren’t getting them, the sales team’s calendars had been wiped out so they were missing important meetings with clients, looking up old emails for information was dicey because lots of them were missing, and the company basically ground to a halt for a few days. Some of the data was never actually recovered.” -Lisa

Now that you’re inspired, motivated and ready to go, submit your entry today!