Reply to post: Re: Beautiful

When the IT department speaks, users listen. Or face the consequences

Kiwi
Pint

Re: Beautiful

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.

Take a document that is auto-saved every 5 minutes. It is open for weeks on end.

It is saved outside of the expected location (perhaps in some deliberate fashion because the user doesn't trust IT with the data for some (usually) idiotic reason), and is saved outside of that location despite instructions from their boss to the contrary.

Said file gets lost and needs some deeper level recovery. How many versions do you think can be recovered? I've seen over 200,000 versions of one spreadsheet on a large recovery. Date-stamps may be a good help, but are not guaranteed. So the user's machine is offline for a few hours, maybe a day, while the recovery software looks for files and pulls what it can off to another disk. You hope that it's saved under the normal extension but odds are good that the user changed the extension because IT are too dumb to know about changed file extensions, and the user cannot recall what they changed it to.

How many hours do you think it takes to trawl through trying to find the file and then the last version of the file? It's not always quick and easy to recover data.

Now. This would not have happened had the user taken a moment to follow the correct procedure, but instead their arrogance means at least a couple of people are unproductive for hours if not days dealing with their problem.

How much is a person's time worth? Why should arrogant idiots who waste company time by not following procedures be given a pass? It's not IT's fault they're incompetent, and if you wish to make the claim of "there to support the business" then how abotu the user do the job they were hired to do without messing up other people's lives by their selfish arrogant incompetence?. My time is for people who do their job to the best of their abilities and follow the proper procedures, the reasons for which were explained to them. If they truly knew better then I wouldn't have been losing a week or more a year of time on other jobs due to their actions. No one else had a problem. No one else needed more than a few seconds of time to recover a file because it was saved in a nice network location with plenty of resources for keeping older versions. At most they lost an hour's work and at most I spent 5 minutes locating it.

If I'd had the authority, they would've been gone on the 2nd incident. (and if I'd had the authority, their HDD would've had just enough room for the OS and some local files, at least then I would've only had maybe a couple of gig of space to look through, not a 1tb HDD with only XP and some stuff - maybe 10G used in total, the rest of the disk gaining deleted flies as the system had no need to over-write 'empty' space for a very long time).

--> I have done scripts similar to yours, especially to keep my own stuff backed up across disks. Messy, but usually quick to implement and as reliable (if not more than) as some of the more expensive stuff. Especially if you're only working with changed files!

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