Back to the Basics: The Necessity of Backups | CM

Experience is the greatest teacher, and often what helps us best serve our customers. Recently we set up several new workstations at a distribution client of ours. It often seems even with nightly backups and other utilities in place, sometimes there is a piece that is overlooked until days or weeks later. In their case it involved a SIP (Schedule Input Program) the office manager utilizes for the online ordering portion of their business. It wasn't until she used the program again that she realized some key data was not present, and after a support call it was discovered these critical files were hidden away in a folder on the old system outside of her profile.

But, as part of our standard procedures we always makes sure to keep backups of old machines and in some cases the old machines or the hard drives themselves for a period of time after they are retired or repurposed for just these scenarios. In just a short time she had access to these files and was up and running again, and thankful we took the extra step to keep the old equipment aside for a period of time 'just in case'.