alt Hacker Newsmy dad told me about this customer that had a server that made automatic backups each Sunday night. The backup script would backup all the data then eject the tape so the manager could put it in the vault and rotate in the other one from the vault.
When the hard drive failed, they restored the customer to the latest backup. Which was the tape still sitting in the tape drive in the server. It was from the first Sunday night after the system was installed years ago
I'm confused, it sounds like you're saying the same tape was being ejected every week and then reinserted without any rotation. But in that case, shouldn't the weekly backup process have failed because the tape was full? Was nobody getting those alerts?
Or do you mean the backup process was fine, but they restored from the wrong media, a very old tape that was about to be overwritten, instead of retrieving the one with last-week's copy?