Fire has recently affected two of our customers. The first event hit one of our largest customers (a prestigious American University who shall remain nameless to save embarrassment!) running PaperCut in a clustered server array. Equipment failure in the server room resulted in a fire that took down the cluster’s shared storage. Fortunately the database server was still intact and we had their quota system up and running on a temporary box within a few hours. The second event occurred at Heron Island Research Labs – our “smallest” and most isolated customer based on a tiny island off the cost of Queensland, Australia. The fire there devastated the research labs at the world-renowned facility.

Both events highlight the importance of backup for both big and small. Now is the time to check your PaperCut backups and ensure that the in-built backup feature is complimented with a good off-disk and off-site (and off-island!) backup policy.