Often, when I give presentations on DBA best practices, I make the obvious point that databases need to be regularly backed up, and that backups need to be tested to ensure that they can be successfully restored. Often, when I make this point, I feel that what I am saying is a little too obvious, and that perhaps I should even skip the point and focus on other best practices. In other words, perhaps I shouldn’t waste my time, and the time of my audience, on covering such basic information.

But the recent incident, where a T-Mobile Sidekick database was corrupted, and did not have proper backups, has caused a publicity nightmare for T-Mobile, and Microsoft (who was responsible for the data), and has lead me to rethink this. By the way, most of the data ended up being recovered several days later.

If Microsoft can make this mistake, so can any company. So from now on, whenever I talk about best practices, I won’t feel guilty about making such obvious points about the importance of backups.