Every Friday I had to take a bunch of magnetic tapes to the bank so they could look after our backups ( which was a good excuse to pop into the pub next door to the bank...)
Oh, and we never ever tested that the backups actually worked
My first job out of school was engineering consulting, writing software models of pre-production military radio hardware. The client was a military contractor, and they paid a crazy sum in order to have 3 DAT tapes: one tape always in the drive used to make the daily backups of the shared working directory, one tape always stored in a bomb-proof bunker, and one tape potentially in-transit via courier. I think it was once a month that the client's sysadmins rotated in the "unused" tape, sent the latest tape to the bunker, and waited for the old tape from the bunker to return as the "unused" tape.
Due to absurd government requirements, we were not allowed to use any version control software other than PVCS, and PVCS could only be used for storing official releases of the models. So, the last person in the office on Friday needed to make a dated zipfile of the shared project working directory.
So, one day I convinced the project manager to just let me rename our working directory, create a new empty one in its place, and tell our sysadmins that I accidentally deleted the contents of our working directory. It turns out that the client's sysadmins hadn't set up anything to expunge the oldest backup and had dutifully ignored the alarms that the tape was full. So, the latest available backup was from about a week after they last changed tapes!
The senior sysadmin prominently had a sign on his cubicle reading "Programmers are the ditch diggers of the 21st century." Those same sysadmins were supposed to keep the server room door open while I reinstalled Solaris on a Sunfire V1280 via serial connection from my laptop, because there were cables carrying TSSCI (Top Secret - Secret Compartmentalized Information) traffic. However, the V1280 consumed so much power that the server-room was under-cooled, so the sysadmins illegally shut the door to keep their cubicles cooler. They had top-secret clearances. They knew their obligations to keep me away from those TSSCI cables. Those lazy lazy arrogant sysadmins.
Anyway, unless you have recently passed a restore-from-backup drill, you don't really have backups. Even if you pay absurd amounts of money for sysadmins with top-secret clearances and absurd amounts of money to store your backups in a bomb-proof bunker.
