Never, ever, under any circumstances, try to implement a 'desktop backup' solution. and then make sure someone is testing the backup on a schedule. TLDR: Setup whatever system fits the client's need/cost, document it, and make sure everyone agrees. If the person says you told them 'all the data was safe!' and you have a document that shows ' we agreed to backup DOCUMENTS and DESKTOP of all users' then it doesn't matter where the data is, all that matters is that you did what you said you would. In my opinion, your worry of liability has no bearing on 'where it's saved' it's all about getting it in writing about what you agreed on, and then every party needs to do their part. Similarly, new and future employees need to be trained, and shown where to save it. If you automate something, and don't look at it till you need the data, you're asking for trouble. if you say save it on the server, and they save it on the C drive, you're ( collectively ) still fucked.Īny system that is designed and implemented correctly, and TESTED CONSTANTLY will mitigate data loss. but 'save it on the server' is no different than 'save it on your desktop/documents' the user still has to be the one to save it to the agreed location. If your goal is to 'pass the buck' then sure. It's a matter of the users, and the 'providers' developing a solution that works best for all involved based on a number of variables, including budget, training, and workflow. Protecting someone's data isn't a matter of liability.

I don't agree with your line of thinking at all. Call me a bigot, that stereotype keeps proving itself true. Particularly if it's a church you're doing the work for. Any no-shit enterprise companies worth their salt tell their users 'if you save stuff locally, you're not in compliance.' Why do you think that is? Because they learned this lesson a long, long time ago.Īny automated solution is virtually guaranteed to cause the kids of heartburn that ends up in small claims court. Cloud storage gives them availability, everything else is on them. The idea is you teach them in real world terms that they are responsible for the whereabouts of their data. The whole system will erode and fall over, at the worst possible moment. Any 'special rules' you create to trap data will just turn into a list of places they aren't going to put things. Any fault tolerance or redundancy you put in place will fail and not be repaired or replaced. Then, when the system inevitably fails and they have lost the very thing you swore was protected, it's your fault. Seemingly, the more robust the solution, the more likely they are to go far out of their way to circumvent it in some catastrophic way. If there's a 'backup solution' then they stop paying any kind of attention to where they put things. It's about where the responsibility for the data lies.

Which was a huge blessing in disguise but still never easy. Well that was the beginning of the end of my employment there. So when the VP of Sales started ripping into me, it was the only time in my work life I stuck up for myself. I just got chewed out by my manager for the outage, that was my fault because I didn’t get any of my requests in writing (I’ve since learned to always have a paper trail for any request) so he stated he didn’t know anything about the failed hard drive. The VP of Sales comes to my desk stating he needed his presentation for a client right away and I had to do everything possible to get it back.

To make matters worse, people were using that mapped drive to store documents because their hard drives were getting full. Low and behold a second drive fails and we lose everything. I tried to get them to cover replacing the drive and having a spare on hand but it kept getting denied. Well we had one hard drive fail but RAID was able to handle it. Well the server they were backing up to was an old file server that they couldn’t get themselves to decommission because there was no funds available for IT. Put everything in OneDrive and forget about trying to backup the workstations.īack when I started in IT, I was the sole administrator (network/system) for a small business that implemented a software that would “backup” the workstation to a mapped drive.

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