Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Backup. The Click then Think based industry


The other day one of my users went on a private vacation to Rome. While sitting in JFK he lost his thumb drive which contained an important report he was working on. The security was no problem in this case but there was something much more important – he already spent 5 working days on this report and he saved it all on his thumb drive. He never thought about keeping a copy on the network. He didn’t email it to anyone or to himself (one of the growing backup methods)
The only leftovers from the report where one paper copy and his thoughts. I ended up OCRing his paper report and was able to recover most of the text. It was few days old and he spent hours updating it. He also had to rebuild his diagrams as they also only existed in the original file.
The end of this story was relatively good but it emphasizes the need for a good backup system where technology covers people’s action.

My first day in the industry I’ve been told by an expert consultant: if you do not know what is going to happen after you click, do not click!
That would be a Think then Click
For some reason this fortune cookie simple piece of advice never reached the world of common users and they use the Click then Think attitude.
Today’s world has zero tolerance to data loss.
That is good because we spend hours working on a document, a piece of software or an important email and then with one click it is all lost
That is bad because our users know they can be reckless and get away with it. Just because the company spend money on backups

Backup is getting more and more attention and spending on equipment and software is growing. Some of my corporate colleagues have a Backup Specialist positions, yes – it is an administrator that does only backup related job.
So what exactly make this niche industry became so important?
Like many other cases it is the user’s fault…

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