Best Practices – Horror Stories

I talked with the more paranoid client about me posting about his system and he didn’t think it was a good idea. I’ve decided instead to share a few horror stories with you.

A few years back I got a call from a client who was in a panic. Her Dell system was giving her fits and she call Dell’s tech support and ended up putting the restore disk in and completely wiping out here system. We had just done a partial backup a few days earlier so all was not lost. It was a 5 hour project just to get her to the point that we could restore data.

Another client who had promised me that she was backing up every day and taking the zip disk offsite called with a problem with her Peachtree Accounting program. The program had “lost” an entire month of data and at the point I was called, she couldn’t even access the data at all. When I checked the backup I found that it was 2 months old. She said she thought about backing up a lot, but was too busy to do so. Fortunately, we were able to find a company on the web that recovered her data completely. It took them less than an hour and the charged her $450.

Just last week a client called and asked me to recover some data off her floppy disks. She had save a dozen or so time consuming reports to the floppies and for some reason all the data was gone. I was unable to recover the data. I suggested in the future that she store things to the hard drive and back them up to the floppies. Better yet, I suggested that she get a flash drive.

I was visiting a friend a few months back and she asked me if I would mind looking at her laptop. She said she was working on it the night before and it made a weird noise. It was late so she set it aside for the evening. In the morning, it never would reboot. The hard drive had crashed and was not recoverable. She did have backups from a month earlier. She had created several websites over the past few days that she had not uploaded. She figured she lost about 20 hours worth of work.

What’s your horror story…

Let me know,

Marc