Comments on: When to and when NOT to ! http://siliconpizza.com/blog/2008/05/14/when-to-and-when-not-to/ I'll have a slice of that Sat, 10 Oct 2009 16:24:26 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 By: Steve Ellwood http://siliconpizza.com/blog/2008/05/14/when-to-and-when-not-to/comment-page-1/#comment-543 Steve Ellwood Sat, 17 May 2008 12:24:05 +0000 http://siliconpizza.com/blog/2008/05/14/when-to-and-when-not-to/#comment-543 My particular favourite was a group which managed their multi-million pound revenue on an Access database; on a shared drive; which wasn't backed up. They had a failure; asked IT support to restore from backup. IT support said "We don't back up that scratch drive." "Luckily" someone had a few weeks old copy they'd been playing with. Several weeks of overtime managed to recreate more-or-less what their data had looked like. Why hadn't they done it better? They "couldn't afford to". I asked if they though that 3 weeks of overtime for 15 people, and the risk their base copy was inaccurate was more affordable; they didn't seem to think that was helpful. My particular favourite was a group which managed their multi-million pound revenue on an Access database; on a shared drive; which wasn’t backed up.

They had a failure; asked IT support to restore from backup. IT support said “We don’t back up that scratch drive.”

“Luckily” someone had a few weeks old copy they’d been playing with. Several weeks of overtime managed to recreate more-or-less what their data had looked like.

Why hadn’t they done it better? They “couldn’t afford to”. I asked if they though that 3 weeks of overtime for 15 people, and the risk their base copy was inaccurate was more affordable; they didn’t seem to think that was helpful.

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