This may not be RM in the strictest definition, but I do have a "war story" 
regarding the sloppy handling and record-keeping of their backup tapes. 
[Though perhaps it was merely a ploy to make things tougher on litigants.]

We were once given the job of restoring over 400 DLT tapes from WorldCom  
in support of some of the litigation. They were sent to us in boxes, all 
jumbled in no particular order, without significant external markings or 
any other documentation.

Of course, one has the problem of matching up multi-tape backup sets in 
sequence. That's bad enough. But (as we found out the hard way) some of 
these were written in a "tape-RAID" which means that they need to be read 
simultaneously on multiple drives. Not only that, some were done on two-
drive RAIDs, some on four-drive RAID on some on eight!! All jumbled 
together.  On top of that, one needed to determine the exact versions of 
the email and backup software, which changed over time.

What a mess. The work was many times tougher than it should have been. I'm 
guessing that WorldCom wound up paying for all this work anyway, as losers 
of the suit, so the lack of documentaion was counterproductive all around.

(Except for making a few bucks for guys like me. :-)

regards,  Chris

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