I don’t know how many times I have seen it and today was no different. A customer who lost almost all of their data due to a Hard Drive failure is now faced with sending the drive to a clean room. It turns out that their backup system has not been backing up since March. I can remember years back telling the customer to invest in a RAID setup. No matter how many times I told them the cost well out weighed the time required to retrieve a server from tape let alone the peril of complete data loss. It is always amazing when I receive blank stares followed by “I don’t remember that!”, when you jog their memory about the RAID conversation. Plus it always happens at the worst time and you have to stop everything your doing no matter who you are helping. A had to leave a regularly scheduled client early and travel uptown to get to the downed server because it was urgent. I spent several hours rebuilding the server’s OS and installing the backup software. At which point I started cataloging tapes starting from what should have been the most recent. When I started to see the dates of the backups I gasped and it must have been loud, because a crowd gathered to see what was wrong. The only option left to the customer was to spend between $1700-$6000 for a six day turn around visit to a clean room. You can get it done much quicker if needed however that is when they put a gun to your head and extort money from you literally. If the customer decided to go the emergency route that number balloons to between $9000 and $20000.
Let that be a lesson to you all, listen to the IT guy that’s what you pay him for. That’s like a doctor telling you have cancer and you need to have an operation and chemotherapy to make sure it is gone completely. You then tell the doctor “I’ll opt for the operation but will pass on the chemotherapy.” Like Duh!