Date sent: Fri, 03 Mar 2000 21:26:03 +1100
From: Peter Williamson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> People
>
> I am about to give a short seminar to my depts users entilted data 101 -
> Keeeping you data safe. It will be a run down on backup techniques and
> physical security for laptops etc. It will particularly targeted at
> those users involved with high risk data i.e manager types with valuble
> corporate data on laptops.
>
> I would appreciate any horror stories that you might have that I could
> use. Of course you would make any neccessary changes to protect the
> innocent
While not dealing with laptops strictly, I had a business customer
about 12 months ago that was doing an upgrade from Windows 3.11 to
Windows 98 on their entire network (no flames please, I have to earn my
money too!). Apart from the usual problems with undetected hardware
etc, one computer was so bad a decision had to be made. Would I keep on
at it trying to fix it and possibly waste hours, or would I bite the
bullet and reformat the hard drive and start from scratch.
After discussing these two possibilities with the owner of the
business, he agreed that I should format and restart. I checked twice
to ensure nothing he needed was on the local hard drive. His response
was "Everything is saved to the network [server]."
Going ahead with the reformat (and checking once again just before I
pressed <Enter>), I got Windows 98 running perfectly first time. The
rest of the operation went like clockwork....until a week later.
Suddenly, an extremely confidential and important spreadsheet was
required for a customer, a job that had taken about 100 hours to do. It
turns out that the spreadsheet and associated documents were the only
things actually saved to the hard drive of the only computer that lost
it's data.
After being cursed by the owner for not saving the data and not
backing it up, I reminded him that he had been asked twice before I
formatted whether he had any information saved to the hard drive that
needed to be saved and he had twice replied no. Further, he had been
instructed to do a FULL backup and the end of the day immediately prior
to my starting the upgrade. Although I was sorry he lost the data, it
was ultimately his responsibility to ensure that no important data had
been saved to the hard drive only and not to the network where it was
supposed to be saved.
Aussie
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