Accountability:A real story…

Accountability, like common sense, applies to every aspect of information technology.
Several years ago, a company that relied on data that could never be re-created wrote shell scripts to do backups early in the morning when the hosts were less busy. Operators at those machines were told to insert a tape in the drive around midnight and check back at 3:00 a.m. to make certain that a piece of paper had been printed on the printer, signaling the end of the job. If the paper was there, they were to remove the tapes and put them in storage; if the paper was not there, they were to call for support.
The inevitable hard drive crash occurred on one of the hosts one morning, and an IT
"specialist" was dispatched to swap it out. The technician changed the hard drive and
then asked for the most recent backup tape. To his dismay, the data on the tape was two years old. The machine crash occurred before the backup operation ran, he reasoned, but the odds of rotating two years' worth of tapes was pretty amazing. Undaunted, he asked for the tape from the day before, and found that the data on it was also two years old.
Beginning to sweat, he found the late shift operator for that host and asked her if she was making backups. She assured him that she was and that she was rotating the tapes and putting them away as soon as the paper printed out. Questioning her further on how the data could be so old, she said she could verify her story because she also kept the pieces of paper that appeared on the printer each day. She brought out the stack and handed them to him. They all reported the same thing—tape in drive is write protected.
Where did the accountability lie in this true story? The operator was faithfully following
the procedures given to her. She thought the fact that the tape was protected represented a good thing. It turned out that all the hosts had been printing the same message, and none of them had been backed up for a long while.
The problem lay not with the operator, but with the training she was given. Had she been shown what correct and incorrect backup completion reports looked like, the data would never have been lost.