Ignore Data backups at your peril
It is a wednesday and over the past 2 days I have taken 2 phone calls where customers have mentioned they are having pc problems.
Whilst we don’t offer pc support we do support our riding centre booking software and so I need to get those yards back up and running quickly as they do not have I.T support or anyone in house who can help them.
A few words of advice when facing a pc meltdown:
- Never rush off to PC World and simply hand over your machine.
- Always advise anyone helping you that you have business critical data on the machine that needs recovering.
- Always ring us urgently to let us know you have had a problem – preferably before you move the machine off site to a repair centre.
- Give us the details of the repair centre so we can discuss with them about the riding centre booking software and the information we need recovering.
So what have we done to help our riding centres get back up and running?
Yesterday we got a phone call from one of the riding centre instructors at 4 in the afternoon. She said they had been unable to access the riding centre software all day but didn’t ring us straight away as they had a print out of the days lesson plan. – NOTE * a problem needs to be reported immediately in case it becomes critical *
After chatting for a few minutes it became apparent that this machine was always slow but now it was getting impossible to work on. We asked the lady to log us in remotely so we could take a look. Once we logged in it was obvious that the machine was having problems, but also it was quite underpowered i.e too little RAM and a very old processor. Whilst we were chatting with the instructor we demonstrated the tests we were running on the pc and she began to appreciate how slow this machine really was.
As I said before, a pc is not our responsibility but we always try and help if possible. In this case it seemed that the only option was to grab the riding centre software from the pc as they had no backups, but also to relocate it onto our servers so they could get immediate access to their lessons etc and keep the business running.
This whole relocation process took a few minutes and the client now has access to their data online, whilst they get their pc problems resolved.
The moral of this story is that backups are without doubt the most important thing to consider when becoming computerised. And make sure you have a strategy in place for dealing with pc problems. That said you need to make sure your staff have the knowledge and tools to initiate a recovery or support plan if needs be. It is no good if only one person knows how to get things sorted.
