Houston … We Have Backup

The story of the Apollo 13 mission is legendary. It is the subject of numerous articles, books, movies and documentaries. “Houston, we have a problem” is probably quoted a few times a day – although the correct form is “Houston, we’ve had a problem” – in corporate boardrooms around the world. Apollo 13 is a story of courage, innovation, partnership and … backup.

After an explosion in one of the spacecraft’s oxygen tanks, the Apollo 13 crew was marooned in space, relying on the ground crew to find a solution that would bring them home safely. As Apollo 13’s Flight Director Gene Kranz said in his book “Failure is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond”: “There is no such thing as good enough. You, your team, and your equipment must be the best. That is how you will win victories.”

As the ground crew came to the realization that the oxygen tanks weren’t leaking – they had exploded and knocked out Apollo 13’s entire oxygen system – they had to accept the fact that the main craft’s redundancy had failed.

Fortunately, Apollo 13 had the ultimate backup: the lunar module and the ground crew. In order to get  the astronauts home safely, the flight and ground crews had to work together. Commander James Lovell, Jr. told the BBC: “It was a collaboration, a tale of two groups. One in a comfortable control room with hot coffee and cigarettes – that had to come up with the ideas to get us back … and the second group in a cold, damp spacecraft to correctly execute those decisions.”

So, on World Backup Day, we hope you are never stranded in space relying on a backup module and team members who are hundreds of thousands of miles away. But if you do encounter a data episode, you can be assured Commvault’s solution, and our team of remarkable partners, will work with you to recover your data and get your systems up and running quickly (and, more important, work with you beforehand to make sure your data is safe).