I am *SO* sick of clueless small-business owners.......

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Here’s a question for you, my fellow Dopers…

Lets say you run your own small business (lets say a Bacon Salt packaging/redistribution company), you have a small staff, a couple of salespeople, graphic designers and the like, and you have a couple computers which store critical business data, and graphics files for your business

you have no I.T. department

Who’s responsibility is it for maintaining your computer system, backing up your data, and testing the backups for integrity, and having backup hardware in case of a hardware failure?

here’s a clue, it’s NOT the technician at the repair facility, it’s YOU, it’s YOUR responsibility to perform regular backups, make sure the backups are good, and have spare hardware on hand, so in the event of the INEVITABLE hardware failure, you can fall back on your backup hardware, minimizing downtime, or in the event of software corruption, lets say, due to bad blocks on the hard drive, you can restore from your last known good backup

I’ve been dealing with a small business customer over the past couple of days, that brought in his laptop because his hard drive was “making bad noises”, and he had NO backups

it turns out that his hard drive has a failing hard drive platter bearing, and bad blocks on the hard drive (85+ bad blocks), and, of course, predictably, he has no backups

I had to attempt to extract the data off his drive (which took over 5 hours) and got a good percentage of it, but was not able to get it all, I notified the customer of this, and told him it was very likely there was still corrupted data on the drive and i had gotten as much as I could, but could not vouch for it’s integrity, due to the bad blocks, I recovered what I could, replaced the hard drive, reinstalled the OS and restored from the backed up data

And yes, the corruption was still there, nothing I could do about it, since the customer did not have any known-good backups, I could only work with the corrupted data

trying to get the customer to actually understand this, OTOH, has been nothing but a headache, he does not understand that simply reinstalling the OS will NOT fix data that was corrupted in the first place, if you run your car into a tree, putting new tires on it will not fix the pre-existing damage…

and somehow, this data corruption is “our fault” somehow?!?

uhh, exqueeze me, I don’t think so, YOU supplied the corrupted data, YOU had the machine with the dying hard drive, YOU failed to perform regular backups, and YOU do not have any backup hardware to use while i was repairing the machine, constant pestering does not get your machine done any faster, if you want to see the source of the problem, I suggest you find the nearest mirror and look into it

and don’t come whining to me about the “high cost” of your repairs, i actually could have billed you for more hours than i did, as I put at least 5 hours of actual work into this machine attempting to recover the data multiple times due to bad-block related failures

the least you could do is take my recommendations to heart about having sufficient backup hardware and performing data backups on a regular basis, it’s not that hard to back stuff up, especially with Mac OS 10.5’s “Time Machine” software, which works brilliantly, BTW, there’s no excuse not to have stable, safe, usable backups

and stop trying to blame us for your damaged software, it was your lacidasical, lazzies-faire attitude towards data backup in the first place that caused this problem, maybe if you had spare backup drives and actually performed data backups, you wouldn’t be dealing with this headache

oh,and since you have a small company with no I.T. department, guess what, it’s YOUR responsibility to insure your data security and safety

here’s a clue, ALL hard drives will die, ALL of them, it’s not a question of If, but WHEN, hard drives are one of the few components in the machine with moving parts, and the tolerances of those parts is phenomenally small, they’re a problem waiting to happen, if you’ve learned anything from this experience, it’s that hard drives cannot be completely trusted, your data is nothing more than magnetic pulses on a rapidly spinning platter, you need to plan for the inevitable hard drive failure, and part of that preparedness is having backup hardware, performing backups on a regular basis, and having backups to your backups

redundancy is key, let me repeat that, redundancy is KEY

If you learned anything from this experience, I hope you can take at least two points from this experience…

backups are critical
hardware and software redundancy is vital

2

Mental notes:

  1. Back-up home computer tonight.
  2. Find out what a “bad block” is… they sound bad.
  3. Hi Opal!
3

I’m surprised my father hadn’t complained about this more. One of the more recent products he’s been selling is a 3D bottom mapping software for boats. Naturally, being software, it needs a computer to run it.

A computer.

On a fishing boat.

Where it’s going to be exposed to salt water and run by someone who at has a high school education at best.

My head hurts just thinking about it. Naturally, none of them make backups, and inevitably the harddrives do crash, sooner than they would in normal circumstances.

I am so glad I’m not him.

4

This rant makes me want to go back something up right now!

"lazzies-faire " hee hee

5

Good, backups are your freinds :slight_smile:

a bad block is an area of the hard drive that is physically unable to store data, all hard drives have bad blocks on them, even brand new from the factory drives, they’ve just been “marked” by the drive and mapped out so they’re not used, over time, thanks mainly to wear-and-tear, more bad bocks can appear, if new ones appear, you generally start getting I/O failures and such, the solution is to back up the drive, repartition/low-level format it, and restore from your backup

if a drive has a large number of bad blocks (IMO anything over 10 bad blocks), the drive itself should be wiped and relegated to low-priority data storage, if not simply replaced

6

I once made the mistake of letting a program run overnight. Didn’t cause problems before. Did this time. Woke up to an unfriendly blue screen. Hard drive was destroyed.

Last backup was about half a year ago.

Much later, the start button got stuck on my machine, and for lord knows what reason, it caused the entire operating system to crap out. Cost me $77 to get the stupid thing running again.

And then, most recently, I got one of those horrendous “porn spybots” which resisted any and all attempts to clean it out (thanks a heap, Norton Antivirus…I can get a program that’ll take care of soft, weak, easily-zapped intrusions for free, dangit), necessitating…what else?..a complete factory reset. Luckily, I was able to copy my entire hard drive to backup beforehand this time, but it still took forever to get my computer back up to speed.

So, the lessons, as always: 1. Electronics are incredibly expensive, and 2. Electronics are incredibly unreliable and a complete pain in the butt. How anyone who’s dealt with them for any period of time, let alone a business owner, can’t understand this is beyond me.

7

Instructeth MacTech, “… a bad block is an area of the hard drive that is physically unable to store data, …”

As opposed to ChiefScott who’s mentally unable to store data…
Much thanks for the larnin’.

8

Me too. I started a manual backup before I finished reading the OP.

I’m not really crazy about my back software though. Basically it just copies folders. I tried Mozy Home recently but it took entirely too long (I have about 30gb of stuff I want to keep.)

What software do the rest of you use for backups?

9

Make sure you bear in mind Murphy’s Laws of Data Integrity as well…

1; the probability of a hard drive failing, taking all the data with it is inversely proportional to the value of the data on that drive, a consumer machine, used for gaming/netsurfing/etc will go for years before failure, wheras a business machine will fail at the least convenient moment

2; the chances of catastrophic hard drive failure are inversely proportional to the types and number of backups you have available, if you have many backup devices, be they hard drives, recordable optical discs, flashdrives, iPods, what have you, you will very rarely have failures, if you have only one backup device, both your main drive AND backup will fail at the earliest inconvenient moment

3; the chances of a failure occuring with catastrophic data loss is, again, inversely proportional to the last time it was backed up, if youonly backed up once, a year ago, the drive will fail, again, at the least convenient moment, a machine that’s backed up daily will never lose data

so basically, for maximum safety, the secret is to back up your data often to as many backup devices as you can, data is transient, and impermanent, a series of magnetic pulses representing 0’s and 1’s

…and Murphy is always lurking around the corner, waiting to strike

10

WAITAMINNIT!!!

Am I not getting my bacon salt now?

11

This goes much beyond just the IT department. Many small business owners have no business being in business. I worked for a company once (sticking to the OP) who are responsible for the psychiatric/psychological care of prison inmates. This includes keeping all of the medical (mental part) records on file, and up-to-date. They had a very pathetic little tape backup. Disks stored, not off-site, not even in a fire safe, nope, in a drawer beside the window.

At one point, I was asked (being as how I was the only person there with any useful computer knowledge/experience) to upgrade the office computers.

Me: Uh, I don’t feel comfortable doing that. Why don’t you call corporate and have them hire someone with all the necessary certifications in case of a mishap.
Clueless Boss: Oh, that’s not necessary, Litoris, I have faith in you. Besides, if there is a problem, we have the backups!
Me: That’s another thing. I don’t think the backups are that great…
CB: What do you mean?
Me: Well, I was concerned about how, ya know, we re-use the same 4 tapes and no one ever checks them, and how you said that screen that says “backup not completed” should just be ignored…and I checked the backups.
CB: And?
Me: They’re blank.
CB: No, that’s not right, I will check them later. So, you’ll do the upgrade, right?
Me: I don’t feel comfortable with doing it. No thanks.
CB: I hired you because you have a degree in IS. This is now part of your job description. You can do the upgrades on Saturday. I will pay you double-time.

Suffice it to say, our computers were not able to accept the upgrade, crashed and the backups were blank as fuck. I was, actually, held blameless. Still, you know? No, i know you know.

Off-topic, but related – I had a customer call in this morning to order $80 worth of giftwrap for Christmas. You know that holiday that happens on Tuesday? The one for which anyone that is going to go shopping will be done shopping for by Monday or SOL? Yeh, that one. She paid $200 to have it overnighted. Morons, the lot of them. I feel you.

12

Amen, brother, sing it.

I’ve never understood the incredible attitudes of small business owners to data integrity and backup issues. I’m a FileMaker geek and small biz is our target audience.

Me: OK, now I want you to set up a dedicated server, turn file sharing off, turn indexing off, no anti-virus, no 3rd-party hard drive backup sw, don’t install anything else on it, and I’ll give you a list of services to disable. Then attach a pair of external HDs and I’ll set up FmServer to make automatic backups 3 times daily 7 days a week. The Monday 3 AM backup will be copied to a location on your regular file server’s D drive via a scheduled batch file.

Him: Oh I think we’ll just stick this on the file server and run it there. I won’t want to buy a whole new server for this.

Me: Yeah, it’s only your data :confused: :rolleyes: :smack: Umm, you do that, you get to find a new developer

or

BizOwner: Our data’s all weird, lots of it’s missing. Everything Julie put in Friday is gone.

**Me: **Let’s see what’s amiss…this is Julie’s workstation? OK… where’s the launcher file I put on everyone’s computer?

BizOwner: We changed the server to DHCP and it quit working, so Joe turned file sharing on and we just put a shortcut to the file itself on Julie’s desktop.

**Me: ** (follows shortcut to target) Good god, what’s happened in here? Files have been duplicated, it looks like someone dragged a folder full of emails in here, and here’s a file that says “Recovered”? Did you run Recover on this and then keep using it? Sorry, I am not supporting this mess, you’re on your own.

13

Hell, even medium and big companies have almost criminally cavalier attitudes toward their IT departments.

My company does a lot of financial and operational restructuring for distressed and/or bankrupt companies, and occasionally my section gets called in for forensic data analysis and fraud detection.

Without exception, every one of the companies we’ve dealt with for a restructuring job has been astoundingly inept in an IT sense. Bad backup schemes, bad record keeping schemes, widely disparate systems and non-integrated ones across locations, extremely trashy and corrupt database data, etc…

I don’t know this for a fact, but I’m starting to suspect that it’s not a coincidence or that the cruddy IT is a result of everything else being cruddy. I’m starting to think that having cruddy IT is a major root cause of these companies’ bankruptcies, and that the inability to recognize the need to spend cash on IT and hire competent people is a major failing of their management teams.

14

My favorite was when I was in IT at a small company in NY. They had a “mission critical”, as in cannot work at all if it’s down printer. It was an older Okidata dot matrix printer, the kind you can put the paper with holes into. If it went down you could buy another one, but it wasn’t like you could just run down to Office Depot; it was a special order type thing and without this ONE printer, no invoices got printed, no work orders were produced, nothing.

There was nothing I could do that would convince them that it was a smart business move to install a second identical printer. It was a “waste of money”. They didn’t think it as much when the printer finally DID die and they wanted a week for a new one. I was never so glad that I don’t delete e-mails and had proof that I’d outlined the exact issue was was told that spending that money was a ridiculous waste.

Idiots, all.

15

Even aside from IT, many small business owners have little clue about anything. I sell health insurance to them…some days I weep for the future of the CA economy.

16

What Antinor01 said bears repeating.

I’ve complained on the boards in the past about how accounting types will postpone maintenance issues, because they got away with it last year, until the physical plant starts to decay. And then the same types go apeshit, because they want to claim they weren’t given the option of paying the relatively small preventive maintenance costs, compared to the costs of an emergency repair or replacement.

:rolleyes:
FWIW, MacTech, as someone who’s lost gobs of data with two consecutive harddrive meltdowns (figurative, not literal) I know exactly who is to blame.

Of course, I’m not a small business owner.

17

I’m a small business owner, and I’m sorry to say you’re talking about me here. I just learned this lesson the hard way. I have a main drive and a backup drive…and believe it, they both failed simultaneously, taking all my business and personal data with them.

Luckily I have a friend who is good with computers. He stuck the hard drive in the freezer and got it to work long enough to recover the data. Now I am SuperBackup Girl! Making backups faster than a speeding bullet! Whoooosh!!

18

Fuffle, looks like you got hit by Murphy’s Law #2, sadly :frowning:

the secret is multiple backup devices of different types, lets say a FireWire external hard drive as your primary backup drive, however, you should also have a second FW backup drive, rotate between them, one backup to drive 1, the next backup to drive 2, third backup to drive 1, fourth to drive two, etc…, it spreads out wear and tear over two backup drives, you should also make a permanent archive to optical disc or other non-magnetic backup media every month or so, so in the improbable event of both your backup drives failing, you can fall back on the archived optical disks

oh, and make sure to store the archives off-site, in case something happens to the business (fire, natural disaster, Giant Fire-Breathing Lizard attack, Radioactive Zombie swarm, what have you…)

another thing worth investing in, especially for businesses is an external FireWire RAID setup, a RAID is basically two hard drives linked together as one, the two most popular configs are;

Striped; two hard drives linked to make a bigger “single” drive, E.G. 2 500GB drives linked to be a 1 TB drive, they’re very fast at storing data, but also incredibly risky, if one drive dies, you lose everything

Mirrored; two drives linked together as one single drive, again, using the two 500GB drives as an example, with a Mirrored RAID, you would only see one 500GB drive icon, yet when you write data to the drive, it saves that data on BOTH drives, you get absolutely identical copies of your data, and if one drive dies, you can still use the other drive, simply replace the failed drive and rebuild the Mirror

now, bear in mind, a RAID setup is twice as risky as a single drive (two potential drives to fail), but if it’s setup as a Mirror, it’s actually safer than a single drive system, the chances of both drives failing at the same time is highly improbable

oh, and while you’re at it, invest in an Uninterruptible Power Supply as well, in the event of a power anomoly, the UPS will switch to it’s built-in battery and give you time to save your work and shut down

every small business should have a Mirrored RAID SETUP, a regular backup schedule, a way to archive their data, a UPS protected machine, and a non-magnetic means of archiving their data, as well as an off site backup…

unless of course you enjoy the possibility of sending your failed drive with your only copy of your company data on it to a data recovery company like DriveSavers, where the average bill STARTS at around $1200…

19

Oh, and just for fun, here’s the specs on my personal G4 Mirror Door tower that I only use for gaming, websurfing, and light dabbling with Photoshop…

4 internal hard drives;
1 120 GB drive running 10.4.2, my Sims 2 drive, as Sims 2 doesn’t like anything higher than that on my G4 tower
2 160 GB drives set up as a Mirrored RAID, running 10.5.1, my general use drives
1 250GB drive, my Time Machine backup drive
two internal SuperDrives (DVD-R burners)
an APC 800vA UPS which gives me about 10 minutes of runtime in a power outage, enough time to save my work (okay, playing) and shut down

the 160GB RAID is backed up to the 250GB drive, once a month, I back up my personal data (photos, music, videos, Sims 2 mods and other miscellany) to DVD-R’s

I still need to add an external Mirrored RAID for a third backup device, as I don’t feel comfortable with only internal storage, but at the moment, money is tight, I don’t keep any critical files on my computer anyway, as I know how unreliable hard drives can be

bear in mind, this is my recreational machine, if I needed a business machine, it’d have even more redundancy…

and no, the ol’ Mirror Door has never given me one picosecond of trouble, it’s a rugged ol’ workhorse, you can’t kill it

20

So can someone help me out here…I’ve never really backed anything up ever.

I’ve got 121.5 GB of data on my two drives. How exactly do I back all this shit up? This is 25+ DVDs worth of info?