Re: Beautiful
How often should you be recovering files for users (which can be a very lengthy process!) when the need to recover files is because they have repeatedly refused to follow simple instructions?
How much is the users data worth to the company? IF $datacost >= $ITstaffcost then recover it as often as required by the business. I had a user like this in our sales dept with critical information in the win 3.1 days. My solution was an absurdly inelegant batch file. Initially it was set to run manually and managed through basic procedure management; the users management checked the completion screen was showing daily. It was later (win95 iirc) set to kick off via a scheduled task at 3PM daily.
Basically my batch file had 30 days backups; every day when run the script deleted folder 30, then did a rename of folder 29 to folder 30 and so on back to folder zero, and folder zero was then created by being xcopied up to the server from data held on the client PC.
Incredibly inelegant, but unsurprisingly we never actually lost any information, regardless of how many times people accidentally (or deliberately) deleted things. I vaguely recall getting fed up being asked to do restores and knocking up a script to prompt for a number and then copy that folder back to the users PC.
That little script ran for something like 15 years, being ported from one replacement PC to the next. It actually kept going past the point of when it should rationally have done (with the advent of roaming and redirected profiles etc) simply because of the simple restore functionality which had saved the sales department bacon quite a lot. It ended when it was discovered that over the years the data had grown to something like several hundred megabytes making the total size stored on the network something in the multigigabyte range, which at the time was a noticible chunk of the hard drive it was being stored on.
It's never been that difficult to automate these things, it's mostly a question of will on the part of the administrator. IT departments that pick up attitudes like that of the chap in this story are the ones that end up getting outsourced because your role is business support, and if your not supporting the business then the business probably wants shot of you.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
