And Other Information Management Tragedies

Paula Williams

The burning of the library at Alexandria has been referred to as a tragic loss of information and knowledge. Livy wrote that the library was destroyed when Julius Caesar torched the fleet of Cleopatra’s brother and rival monarch. Another myth is that Hypatia, a fifth-century scholar and mathematician of Alexandria, was dragged from her chariot by an angry Pagan-hating mob of Christian monks. The Christians had her burned alive in the library to in a fit of religious fervor.

Whatever the cause, there is no way of knowing what mathematical, philosophical, scientific, and other treasures may have been among the 40,000 volumes thought to have existed in the library.

Today, there are great treasures of knowledge lost every day in every corporation. These treasures are not the result of wars, political or religious uprisings, or anything so meaningful. They are lost by pure accident, negligence or equipment failure.

In the course of running our small business (Ravenwerks) for the past five years, we’ve had two hard drive failures on any of our 5 computers. Thanks to the obsessive attentions of our resident technical wizard, all of the data was backed up. In both cases, less than a day’s work was lost.

Another thing we’ve run into at corporations large and small is the simple misplacement of information. Someone leaves the company, taking with them (sometimes inadvertently) the only knowledge of a cryptic or incomplete filing system. Or the power goes out while you’re scorching through a brilliant proposal or presentation. Or you simply forgot where you filed a document. (Paper or electronic.)

The Solution

Here are some suggestions to prevent tragic loss of the products of intellectual labor:

Automate Backups

Backing things up is sometimes the last thing on people’s minds when they’re concentrating on tasks at hand and trying to get through a hectic day. Any system you can set to automatically back up is cheap insurance against loss.

Set up an automatic save while you’re working on documents using office applications (like MS Word or WordPerfect.) The default is usually to save approximately every 10 minutes, but as fast as I work, 10 minutes would be an unacceptable loss to me. I’ve set mine to save every 2 minutes. The autosave works in the background and I never notice it. (If autosaves slow your machine down enough to bother you, try freeing up some disk space or upgrading to a faster processing speed.)

Set up nightly or weekly backups from your PCs or file servers. You can back up to a separate system, or to ZIP or JAZ discs or CDs. Keep one copy of everything at a different physical location. (On a computer or on your storage media.)

Review Your Filing System.

As your business evolves, it’s worth the time and energy to review whether your filing system is actually working for you, or if you’ve outgrown its structure.

Get everyone to participate in the same filing system. If everyone keeps their own files on their own PCs, you won’t have access in case a person is out sick or their equipment fails. Set up guidelines for even remote or work-at-home people to save their work to the network and make sure it gets backed up and others can understand how to get to it.

Look into Knowledge Management Products

Products such as search engines (for online material) or filing and indexing systems give you more options for finding specific documents or objects. Broadvision, Documentum, Verity, and others supply different types of version-control and searching capability. (And different strata of financial impact when you install them!) If the loss of a document would impact you financially, these items can quickly pay for themselves.

Conclusion

It doesn’t take a civilization-changing war, or a mob of angry Christians to cost you 40,000 volumes of precious information. Odds are, if you handle large amounts of information, some of it will disappear for one reason or another. But it’s not something people typically think about unless it’s happened to you.  At least once.

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