Although this article has nothing to do with IIS directly, it does have everything to do with total loss of critical data which is relevant to any content based server such as IIS. On Friday the 29th of Feburary I returned home to the flat I share with my fiancee here in London to find her extremely distressed. She promptly inform me that we had been burgled, and that the low life who performed the act had gotten almost everything of value to us. My head began throbing and I became dizzy as my fiancee unraveled the serires of events that had occurred that night.

Upon returning home my fiancee found a young (30ish) unfamiliar black man with braided hair exiting the communal hall area just near our flat door. As he pushed past her to get out she noticed he had a light colour plastic bag which was full. Unfortunately the lights weren't on and by the time she realised that the door to our flat was wide open he was already off down the street with the majority of our most valued possessions. Our main losses where my Dell XPS M1210 laptop, a Nexto ND2300 photo storage device and an Olympus digital camera.

Without a doubt our greatest loss is the Nexto ND2300 photo storage device. My fiancee and I have been travelling the world for around 18 months now, and that device held every single photo we had ever taken in that time. Four months through Central and South America, several weddings (including a family wedding) and valuable memories from holidays to Asia, Europe and Africa, all gone. Because of the file size and quantity I had only made one up to date backup, which was to my laptop which was also stolen.

The important lesson here was that a single point of failure existed as my backups were located in the same location. I would have had the same result if the flat had burnt down, or any other similar event that wiped out our flat . It is a very, very, very hard lesson learnt and I can be 100% sure I'll be using online backup services in the future to ensure that my data is protected from unforeseeable events such as being burgled. With almost no chance now of our equipment being recovered, and even less chance of our data still being on there if the police were able to recover them we are now left to endure the pain of total data loss.