Customer taught me more about backups than any cert class

Had a small law office in Austin call me out last month. Their server died, plain and simple. Power surge took the board. They had a NAS sitting right there, but nobody ever set up the sync software. The office manager said, "We thought it was backing up automatically." That stuck with me. I see this all the time. People buy hardware, plug it in, assume it works. I spent three hours recovering what I could from the drive platter, got maybe 60 percent of their files. The look on her face when she saw the missing client folders. I told her the truth, no sugarcoating. She paid my $400 invoice without arguing. Now I ask every client one question before I touch anything: show me where your last good backup lives. If they can't point to it, I fix that first. Anyone else run into this where the gear was fine but the setup was the real failure?

1 comments

1 Comment

jesse_cooper17d ago

That hits way too close to home because I've literally been that customer before. Bought a nice little external drive, plugged it in, saw it show up on my computer and just figured that meant everything was safe. Turns out I had to actually set up the software and pick folders and schedule times, none of which I did. It died about eight months later and I lost a ton of family photos that I still kick myself over. The worst part is how easy it would've been to avoid, like thirty minutes of reading the manual that I just skipped because I thought it was plug and play. So yeah, I feel for that office manager, she probably trusted the box to do the thinking for her and that's just how these things go sometimes.