IT Disaster Tales

When she came home, I calmly told her she was all set, and her laptop was running like new, and I had backed up her work.  She just looked at me.  I thought she’d be happy, but I shrugged and started packing up to leave.  All of a sudden, she burst into tears of joy and jumped into my arms. She hugged me tight, and gave me a huge kiss on the lips in front of her husband.  All I could think of saying was, “Please!  Take her back!  I already have one wife, I can’t handle two!” I visited a hair salon in northern New Jersey in 2010.  The owner was still using a hair salon management program written in DOS and running on a Windows Millennium PC. First thing I do before I work on a PC, especially an old one, is ask whether the backups are current.  She beamed and said that she backs it up every day.  I asked her to show me what she does.  She turned and pointed to her long-time assistant and said she does it for me.  Uh, huh.  I turned to her assistant and asked her to show me what she does.  The assistant pointed to the Windows Desktop and said she clicks on an icon and it just runs.  Uh, huh. I checked the properties of the shortcut and found it pointed to a program in a folder.  The program was a simple batch file that runs copy commands.   I reviewed the commands and looked at the folder it was backing up files to.  I found the files in the destination folder were 15 years old.  I told the owner; the color drained from her face. She said, “We also have a USB hard drive we back up to!”  I asked her to point me to it.  She showed me the drive.  I said, “I see. So you’re backing up to this drive that is turned off and unplugged?!”  She sighed, and then asked me to set her up with a working backup method. Talk about luck!  She hadn’t had a successful backup in 15 years, but hadn’t suffered a serious failure in all that time. Wow! David Streit is an IT consultant and an entrepreneur, as principal of Stephill Associates, LLC. in Manalapan, New Jersey. Stephill provides IT infrastructure and technology advisory services for small business clients in New Jersey and New York City. Streit has worked with PCs and technology for more than 25 years.  He and his wife, Claudia, have two daughters, Hillary and Stephanie. Stephill Associates website: http://www.stephillassociates.com