Re: Late times.
Some time around 2005, i visited a brand new client of the consultancy I was working for. This customer was an architect firm, doing significant projects - i'd estimate that they had around 200 architects, designers, engineers and other chargeable consultants working in the firm. Picture a significant open office environment with tons of cad machines interspersed with large scale models of resort developments and the like.
As part of the onboarding of a new customer, we audited all the basics of the environment to look for anything drastically in need of some TLC.
This particular firm had an "interesting" backup process. The main server ran a single mirrored set of drives. The backup process that had been designed and architected by the owner of the company, and self-certified IT expert, involved removing one of the mirrored drives each night and taking it home. Yep, each and every day he'd degrade the RAID set, and each morning plug the drive back in and wait for it to re-sync.
After carefully explaining to the owner why this was such a bad idea, he agreed to implement a proper backup system. I went away and priced up a a relatively modest solution comprising of a single tape drive, controller, backup software etc. Probably about $5k or so of gear + labour. Remember this guy had probably 200 architects, drafters etc working on multi-million dollar development projects.
Well, it seems he thought that $5k was FAR too much money for backup and refused to go ahead. So we made the call and effectively sacked him as a client.
Fast forward 6 months to one very very very stressed sounding business owner begging us to come and try to fix his server which had shat itself during one morning's drive rebuild. His team of architects, engineers etc were basically sitting around doing no work, and he has lost absolutely every piece of information they had ever created.
We should have helped, but... I was feeling spitefull that day. I asked him if a $5k backup system seemed cheap now, and hung up.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
