Oops.

Yesterday our CTO called a meeting of all the senior managers and I hear he was near tears. We all thought it was because of the nonstop network issues since December.

Come to find out, there's more to it than that.

Yesterday a PC tech re-imaged our CEO's laptop and it wasn't backed up, despite assurances to the contrary. Oops.

The PC tech fucked up. Doesn't he realize that a big part of his job is to keep others from making mistakes?

Sure, but nobody expects him to take the blame.

Instead all of IT is being held culpable.

Why shouldn't he take the blame? He fucked up. You didn't describe the "assurances to the contrary." Did these assurances come from his boss in the IT department, or from someone whose job it was to verify that the computer had been freshly backed up?

Came from the CEO himself.

Apparently it turns out he doesn't know how to do a backup.

When I worked in the computer industry we'd quite often see a physical drive partitioned into logical drives (C:, D:) with C backed up to D.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Came from the CEO himself.

Apparently it turns out he doesn't know how to do a backup.

I would have guessed that, but I wanted to hear it (and it ain't the first time). The pc tech erred in taking the user's word for it, no matter who it was. The IT Dept. should have procedures in place to prevent shit like that.

Many businesses underestimate the value of a first-rate IT department. Unfortunately, these same businesses don't have the faintest idea what makes an IT department first-rate.

There is client-agent backup software available (and has been for about twenty years) that keeps all the clients backed up without intervention from the user. It saves everything in a database in a system similar to version control software. At the last place I worked, we could buy a new computer and duplicate the user's old computer with a few mouse clicks. Called it "Bare Metal Restore." The company I worked for created the software so, of course, we had it easy

I used to have multiple partitions on my hard drives, but the idea of backing up one partition to another is hilarious. I backed up to tape drives on my home computer, and to the company servers at work. I no longer use multiple  partitions (which seems odd because the fucking things are so huge now), and I back up the internal hard drives to an external drive. To keep things secure, I clone the O/S drive every month or two. Takes five minutes to recover from a completely fucked drive, whether caused by hardware failure or fungus (I like that word better than virus).

"Many businesses underestimate the value of a first-rate IT department."  Yeah, we're in that situation.  Our hospital has about doubled in size in the past two years, plus we've added all sorts of new technology like VOIP and Citrix and CIS and fancy imaging options.

But IT has not been expanded.  We're still the same size, with the same people, and double the workload.  

What we've been told is that more beds bring in more money, but more IT does not.  Therefore, although the hospital is doing "phenomenally" economically (their words) all the investment is going into expanding capacity.

Seems kinda shortsighted to me.