Windows question

Ginge wrote

You are thinking too big.

In a small business at 2 in the morning there are no open files or
uncommitted writes. There is the stock database, the sales database,
the books and the mail spool. Prolly not much else. All of it as vital
to Bloggs the Tailor as the in transit info is to DHL.

 

I didn't work on Colossus.

 

heh. Nice come back.

 

Why, thank you!



Phil

--
Phil Launchbury, Network & Infrastructure PHB
Triumph Tiger 955i
"I'm training the bats who live in my cubicle
to juggle mushrooms"
Remove sick person to email me

 

Of course, you just don't need a few too many...

 

Yes but you are paying more dosh for an additional service rather than
getting it bundled for marginal cost by your ISP.

 

Here - have some of my irony. I seem to have an oversupply..

Phil

--
Phil Launchbury, Network & Infrastructure PHB
Triumph Tiger 955i
"I'm training the bats who live in my cubicle
to juggle mushrooms"
Remove sick person to email me

 

Sure, I'll just add it to my whoosh-pile.

 

Oh doing it is the easy bit... she's more than capable of implementing a
simple backup strategy herself, and is well aware of the need for offsite
storage. For anything more sophisticated she can ask me for advice, and for
a reasonable fee I'll even set it up for them (or presumably their 'pops in
once per fortnight or so' techie can do it).

It's more a case of how to persuade the owners of the company that their
vital data (you know, stuff like billing, client details, certain case
notes, etc) is stored on a server (oh and bits on some desktop PCs), that
server has only the one disk, and no backup... and well... you know... it's
not just things like fire and flood that they have to worry about, a simple
disk failure will have 'em in the shit up to the eyeballs in an instant. But
nobody-with-the-chequebook seems overly keen to listen to anything a mere
legal secretary has to say. Ho well, **** 'em I spose.

 

Were I running any sort of business that held vital electronic data then
yeah, that'd be a cool solution for a small business, so long as the storage
charges weren't too high.

 

Zobo Kolonie wrote

I learnt a very valuable lesson from the techie perspective when I
worked for a city firm of Chartered Accountants: Demonstrate the cost in
pounds shillings and pence of them not listening to their mystagogue.

 

Yeah, in their case it would be "bye bye business" if they lost their
server, or damned close to it anyway.

I tried the cost / benefit angle and had it fail spectacularly once, which
amazed me (I was young and unaware of the depths of some peoples' stupidity
when faced with spending money). My argument at the time went: We've got
£2.5 million worth of investment all tucked away in this one room, it's the
core of the entire Europe-wide IT solution, and as was demonstrated the
other day when Bodgit & Scarper (our maintenance men) managed to drill
through the main power inlet it is not invulnerable and despite our best
efforts it never will be. What I propose is to take the disused wiring
frame and the development crate over the road and set up a fall back
position there in the comms room at the back of the accounts building, I'll
need to buy a few small pieces of extra kit but we already have alternative
cable access back to the various buildings around the site. Please note that
this comms room is already airconditioned and secure to the same standards
as the main machine room (not that we're insuring the development crate
anyway). In the event of catastrophic failure in the main building I
estimate that with this solution we can switch in 30 - 50% of our current
capacity in as little as two hours, depending on the nature of the original
failure of course, but given that we're a multi building site we can be
pretty much assured that we'll at least get the accounts and one operational
building up and running again in short order. I've got my proposals costed
here, you'll see that we can achieve this for about £40,000 up front and
zero additional ongoing maintenance costs.

Not one of the buggers, not a single member of the board showed the
slightest interest in the risk management angle, they took one look at £40k
and basically said "**** off" then laughed at me.

My gob was smacked (and my reputation was shafted (again)) :-/

OK, as an older and hopefully wiser chap these days I'd go to them first
with details of the risk, lay it on thick, and once they got all worried up
about that I'd let them stew on it for a while before presenting them with
the costed DR proposal. But like I said, I was young(er) and stupid(er) in
those days

 

Give me the keys for a couple of hours.
The cost of returning the HDD will be £50K.

 

A steaming pile of whoosh? Ewwww...

 

I bet there's a black run down the North face of that pile by now ...