Do we need the Germans to tell us to back up our data?

The cost of negligence can be immense (Courtesy backup.info)

The German ambassador to Ghana visited the minister of foreign affairs on Wednesday to present him with soft copies of signed bilateral agreements between the two countries. This became necessary after fire gutted the offices of the ministry three years ago, destroying decades of papery archives scarcely preserved in other forms. I was wondering exactly what precipitated that meeting. Could it be Ghana, as represented by the ministry, claiming to have lost or forgotten the contents of such important documents?

This is yet another example of a major Ghanaian institution playing dumb with tech. With the proliferation of cloud-based backup solutions, not to mention the availability of cheap solid-state and disk-based storage mechanisms it sounds silly that we would lose such important documents because of a fire outbreak. If the documents were important to us we would have scanned and stored them in multiple locations for safe-keeping.