BEFORE YOU JUDGE ME, I FORGOT.

My job is a very delicate one which requires a lot of attention to details. One reason I love working alone with no one disturbing my work. But I’m in Nigeria where companies expect you to always multitask and still come out at the very top. This is usually not easy for me, but I try my best to do as much as I can, especially when I know the company is counting on my job to survive. However there was one time when I forgot to do something very simple which cost the company a lot, and that has made me to always look out for loop holes when executing my job in future. Looking out for loop holes here is simply having a backup plan in case tragedy would strike.

Image by cookie_studio on Freepik

So I had to migrate two of my company websites from the corrupted servers they were in, to a new server which by the way costs a lot of money. Thinking about the total cost of the migration alone ran into several millions. But then one silly mistake cost the company over hundreds of millions and could have even cost me my job. Although it wasn’t 95% my fault, if I had remembered, I would have saved the company a great deal. It all started with the previous server we were using, the company managing all our digital affairs had been doing so for about 3 years now, but the truth was they weren’t really doing anything to secure the websites which further led to the company being a victim of numerous hacker attacks.

The attacks were so much that our domains were blacklisted and thus the migration was compulsory. The first website migration was successful, but the second came with lots of huddles that literally shook me to my core. I was at a breaking point where my job came on the line. What happened was that in the process of migrating I was supposed to have my own backup, and normally I would create three backups (for the website) but after I created one, something took my attention and I forgot to check if the backup I created was fine, plus I also forgot to add the remaining two backups and instead I just started migrating.

Image by freepic.diller on Freepik

It was at the middle I discovered the new server was not accepting the files from the old server, and when I checked, all the files had been corrupted. It Turned out that the company that was managing our files were not just poor in their security, but they also kept us on a server that was impossible to move from on our own. And because I forgot to do the second and third backup and also check the first one I did, I never knew it was corrupted. At that point, not only were the backups corrupted, 70% of the important files the company had worth hundreds of thousands of dollars were also corrupted. We were unable to recover the files because that entire server was corrupted, but my forgetfulness was the icing on the cake.

THIS IS MY RESPONSE TO HIVE LEARNER'S PROMPT FOR WEEK 142 EPISODE 3