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06 May 12 - 05:01 PM (#3347579) Subject: BS: Massive IT scare From: SPB-Cooperator I had a massive, heart-stopping IT scare today as when I was tidying my office an moving a pc, it stopped booting - I started asking arouind various forums/fora for help, considering moving the hard drive to another PC, and starting to think it was a hard drive failure. HD connecting cable came loose when I moved the box to its cubby hole. After pushing it back in place, everythiong worked fine. Thje most scary thing is that this is the PC I run the PAYE Bureau service and I still had some year-ends to do - I could face the thought of having to try to get the gateway access codes back from HMRC in tim e for the deadline for returns as I am hioldiay for a few days. |
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06 May 12 - 05:29 PM (#3347582) Subject: RE: BS: Massive IT scare From: GUEST,Eliza That's the trouble with this technological world, SPB. One loose wire or a malfunction and everything goes pear-shaped! Now when I was young..... (groan!)... we used mechanical typewriters and filed stuff in a filing cabinet. Short of a serious fire, things were safe and retrievable. I'm still not convinced that these modern times are better. |
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06 May 12 - 06:15 PM (#3347597) Subject: RE: BS: Massive IT scare From: MGM·Lion Typewriters? Why, when we had to copy all out in beautiful clerical hand with quill pens, we made jolly sure not to go making errors which it would take 6 months to rectify ~~ apart from the 50 lashes and three days fasting the Lord Of The Manor would probably order the Abbot to command... And what in the name of Beelzebub is a "filing cabinet"? Brother Caedmon. |
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06 May 12 - 06:18 PM (#3347599) Subject: RE: BS: Massive IT scare From: JohnInKansas Short of a serious fire ... or insects, mildew, mishandling by the lumpers who pack all that paper when you move, misfiling that makes the one piece of paper you need irretrievable, or about a thousand other "minor things" we've encountered. I've found paper around ten to 15 years old so brittle you needed a spatula to get a page onto a scanner to capture any record of what it said. Some "office grade" paper from about that far back doesn't last a whole lot better than that, although recent office papers, (back to about 20 or 30 years(?)) have mostly gone to "acid free" compositions that are a little better, and with them you only have the faded ink to try to pull out. (There was a certain era when many ball-point pen inks faded very rapidly, and also "smudged" a lot in storage, sometimes giving significant legibility problems.) It really is hard to tell which is better. It's probably a little easier to keep a duplicate set of your important bits with digital stuff, but actual success with the WOM "backups" as recommended by some is limited by the hidden fact that successful RESTORES are actually rather rare. Like the pilot who moves up from single engine to twin to have a safety margin: With two engines, you're twice as likely to have one that fails and the overload of flying a twin on one engine makes it about twice as likely that the second one will fail from the overload before you get very far. But as the "twin engine instructor" will assure you, "you can always get to the point of impact with the remaining engine ..." so you feel "reassured."(?) John |
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06 May 12 - 06:29 PM (#3347603) Subject: RE: BS: Massive IT scare From: gnu I double backup all my doc files every week on USB. I double backup anything really important on disc immediately. I also print important docs immediately... drafts too. I don't like scares. Been there, just about sh*t myself. |
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06 May 12 - 07:40 PM (#3347621) Subject: RE: BS: Massive IT scare From: SPB-Cooperator I am in the process of installing the bureau software on every PC and laptop I have, and keeping backups on each machine plus at least one flash drive. I have backups, but on the same pc. The though of having to explain why their payroll records have been lost is ..... not nice!! When we had our PC stolen years back at the time we were renting an office we had a similar problem, but at that time the only PAYE we had to reconstruct at that time was for the client who we rented the office from, so they were sort of understanding. What was also annoying was that the felon(s) cut through the VDU connection cable rather than unscrew it, so we had to bin the displays. The advantage of PCs over typewriters is that it is so much easier to correct typos - remeber the old days of tippex papers and trying to reallign the spacing. Even worse if the typo was a missing letter!!! Also PCs give a chance to review and revise letters and reports. In one job I had two part-time admin assistants who did all the typing, and often I would draft a report, get it typed, and then change my mind about what I wanted to say. I usually said to the guys - feel free to improve it! They got very good at proof reading my hand written copy to avoid too much retyping. |
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06 May 12 - 09:12 PM (#3347640) Subject: RE: BS: Massive IT scare From: JohnInKansas A standard joke not all that long back was that you could always tell which one was the boss's PC by the "Whiteout" on the monitor. It's probably still accurate in quite a few places, although in those places you don't often dare to venture much of anything that might be taken as a "joke" about the boss. With some of the better, or "special purpose" OCR programs now, you can get pretty good recognition on lots of people's handwritten notes. While the recognition is mostly as good as can be expected, most of the OCR stuff I've seen recently still bogs down trying to translate the "dots" when you run a scan of a music score through them. They "eventually" get done, and mostly they figure out which dots are just dots, but it really slows them down. I have been keeping two external USB (1TB) drives where I kept separate "identical" copies of all the homemade files from all three or four of our home computers, but I recently hit "drive full" errors on those, so I'm in the process of reorganizing what goes where. We're currently down to two working machines, each of which has a "second" spare 2TB HD so I've got two good copies of everything on two separate drives in each, but I'd still like to have a "portable" (external portable USB drive) master for travel times, as soon as I can decide what needs to be on them. I'm recently running into the (apparently little known) NTFS FCB confusion, in which the drive "loses track" of what's where. It's generally "temporary," and corrects itself if you reboot; but I do lots of "F5" checks when it fails to display folder changes, and get almost daily "Windows Explorer has stopped working and will be closed" messages. So far as I can tell no data has been lost, but stuff that goes places other than where it says it's going have been frequent enough to be a "minor(?) annoyance." Being safe ain't really all that easy. John |
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06 May 12 - 09:58 PM (#3347650) Subject: RE: BS: Massive IT scare From: GUEST Sorry, but you need to have everything stored on a backup drive, if not also stored in remote or "cloud" server. It is easy and inexpensive to do, and it is an absolute necessity(especially if you are handling the financial records of others!). Hard drive failure is not an "if", it's a "when". A good back up system will have you up and running in minutes to hours, with no work lost. Please remember to sign in with a consistent guest name. Otherwise you risk having posts deleted. Thank you. -mod- |
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07 May 12 - 01:44 AM (#3347675) Subject: RE: BS: Massive IT scare From: Backwoodsman If you have a 'backup' on the same PC, you don't have a viable backup at all. If the PC's HDD fails (and mine did, about 6 months from new) you're completely f***ed, you've lost the lot. I have an external USB HDD that I back up (and, equally importantly, verify the backed-up data) all my data on weekly. Makes sense. When I was working we had a company rule that, in a network of 50 or so PCs, no data was stored on local (i.e. PC) HDDs - all saved files had to be saved on the network servers, which were backed-up every night. |
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07 May 12 - 04:58 AM (#3347705) Subject: RE: BS: Massive IT scare From: SPB-Cooperator One problem I used to have with one client was that they kept their PCs on the floor, and the USB ports were two inches above ground level. In my time there I managed to tread on two flash drives.... |
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07 May 12 - 05:03 AM (#3347709) Subject: RE: BS: Massive IT scare From: JohnInKansas The fairly common corporate requirement to put everything on the company network servers usually takes care of the backup problem if the company keeps the servers backed up. That was, at least at one time, the rule at Microsoft, where even outside contract workers had to "put it on the net," and is also what I believe was the reason several successive Windows versions gave detailed instructions on how to make "backups," with NO ONE at Microsoft ever checking to see if a "Restore" would work. They didn't have to ever restore anything - just call IT and it got put back. Win95, Win98, and many WinXP machines made WOM backups. (I'm sure you've heard about the WOM - Write Only Memory. Unlimited capacity, and very fast, but ...) John |
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07 May 12 - 07:16 AM (#3347735) Subject: RE: BS: Massive IT scare From: GUEST,Eliza MtheGM, Brother Caedmon eh? Is he related to Brother Cadfael by any chance? I'm smiling at all these indignant posts despising my defence of the old ways. Like the sneezing baby in Alice that was peppered liberally by the cook, I only did it to annoy, because I know it teases! |
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07 May 12 - 07:31 AM (#3347740) Subject: RE: BS: Massive IT scare From: Dave the Gnome Brother Caedmon was as an illeterate peasant and then by the miraculous intervention of God (or dare I suggest some manipulative Abbess or Abbot of Whitby? :-) ) suddenly found he could write beautiful poetry and prose. Anyway, back to the plot. Use standard backups by all means - they are fine to keep your important files. What happens if your PC blows up though? What happens if all the PCs you have suffer the same virus? If it is that important just buy another PC of the same or better spec. Load it in exactly the same same way. Keep it off your netwrok, preferably at another office, and update the data every time you feel that you would loose too much if everything went down! At less than £300 for a good working PC it isn't exactly out of the question! You could even dual boot it and use a second disk for trialing updates to the software or OS. Cheers DtG |
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08 May 12 - 05:50 AM (#3348098) Subject: RE: BS: Massive IT scare From: GUEST,CJB Yes - I can relate to all of this; especially when my XP laptop with 500GB of data files (MP3s, docs, VOBs, etc., etc.) on the two hard drives refused to reboot one day due to a severely corrupted registry. Luckily I had a small Notebook and Googled around the web for a solution. This lead me to a neat little app. called Linux Puppy. This ran in RAM only and booting with this gave me a working system. I could then copy all of my files - yes all of them incl. system files - onto a 1TB hard drive. So the files were saved. It then took me three months to rebuild the laptop - which alas is too old for Windows 7, so I had to put XP back on. Grrr. On the necessity of corporates making backups I remember once at work we had a tour of the vast computer hall full of spinning tape drives and whirring disk drives. The guys there used roller skates to wizz around swapping tapes and hard disc packs between the library and the hall. It was a massive system called BABS for airline bookings. Anyway one day the whole system suddenly went down. It appeared that one of the guys had tripped over on his skates, put his hand out and inadvertently pressed a large unprotected red button on the wall. This was the emergency 'stop' button which brought the whole system to a crashing halt. Basically it cut the power. It took a few days to restore the system. Whether they had backups right to the point of failure I do not know. But manually checking in thousands of passengers using paper tickets is very time consuming, and there is no audit trail. It took weeks to recover from the crash. And the red button was fitted with a cover to stop it all happening again. |
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08 May 12 - 06:58 AM (#3348122) Subject: RE: BS: Massive IT scare From: JohnInKansas Guest,CJB - I remember when a "BRS" was the only way you could reboot a computer.(and you did it pretty often.) And I recall about when I got my first computer that would reboot if you did the "Three Finger Salute" twice - which made it a lot easier. Then Mickey came out with Windows 3.1 that they advertised as "The End of the ABEND" with what we've learned has been typical of Microsoft prophets ever since. John |