Yet another dead HDD discovery

Had a user with a dying or very close to dead hdd. Failed Maxtor diags. Would not boot into Windows. Slaved it on my computer but Windows refused to read it (kept asking to format it).

Unfortunatley this person kept their Quicken DB on there and never made a backup. In a last ditch effort, I booted to DOS and was able to see the contents of the drive! I then rebooted to DOS with the NIC drivers and managed to copy all the needed files from the dying drive to the server.

Probably old hat for most of you - but it made up for my otherwise sh!t day.

Were they a user you support at work, or a customer? If they were a customer, you should've given them a nice big 'stupid fee' for not backing up. When I was running an office using QB, I was required to backup weekly to a ZIP. I backed up daily.

This was a user in a small "workgroup", with one of the workstations acting as their file server, on which resides the backup tape. Unfortunately, she took it upon herself to set-up Quicken for her boss and neglected to put the Quicken DB in a folder on the server.

It's a constant struggle here, because the CEO wants to treat the company as a group of 28 smaller groups, each run independently with their own staff. To keep the "entreprenual(?) spirit" they don't want everyone to use a single file server with a single backup. Basically we have 28 different servers with 28 different backups. It's a nightmare to support sometimes, but as long as the checks cash...

I just can't understand your CEO's reasoning behind that. Even if each of the groups have their own budget, you can still charge a share of a central server out or even charge for the time that's used. How do they manage users? What happens if they want to share stuff between groups? OR are all the groups at different sites?