J.D. "Illiad" Frazer (hi Illiad...) is addressing data loss in the most recent User Friendly series, focusing on the marketing guy (Stef) losing his work and then blaming IT for not having appropriate backups.
I know J.D. is going for the funny here, but... Stef has a point. It's IT's job to plan a backup strategy for users. No way should IT depend on sales, execs, or marketing types to remember or think about backups -- any more than the IT department should be concerned with marketing strategy.
I know lots of bona fide IT folks who fail to make regular
backups, so it's really unreasonable to expect that the average user is
going to make it a priority to create backups. Yeah, it'd be great if every user automatically backed up their own data and took responsibility for it. It'd also be great if I could lose weight by eating chocolate chip cookies and a pint of ice cream every night, and about as likely.
I know I don't expect a moral from the funnies, but I wouldn't mind J.D. slipping in a "moral of the story" for IT folks here, just in case I return to the trenches at some point: Users do their jobs, IT should worry about making sure data is backed up*.
*This does not, of course, absolve users of doing sane things like saving documents that they're working on regularly. Backups only go so far. IT should make sure that your vast repository of documents and email don't get sucked into the abyss if your hard drive goes toes up -- but if you started working on a sales pitch at 9 a.m. and didn't save before you went to lunch and Bob from sales sat on your keyboard and closed Word... well, that's all on you, my friend.
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Data loss and comics
J.D. "Illiad" Frazer (hi Illiad...) is addressing data loss in the most recent User Friendly series, focusing on the marketing guy (Stef) losing his work and then blaming IT for not having appropriate backups.
I know J.D. is going for the funny here, but... Stef has a point. It's IT's job to plan a backup strategy for users. No way should IT depend on sales, execs, or marketing types to remember or think about backups -- any more than the IT department should be concerned with marketing strategy.
I know lots of bona fide IT folks who fail to make regular
backups, so it's really unreasonable to expect that the average user is
going to make it a priority to create backups. Yeah, it'd be great if every user automatically backed up their own data and took responsibility for it. It'd also be great if I could lose weight by eating chocolate chip cookies and a pint of ice cream every night, and about as likely.
I know I don't expect a moral from the funnies, but I wouldn't mind J.D. slipping in a "moral of the story" for IT folks here, just in case I return to the trenches at some point: Users do their jobs, IT should worry about making sure data is backed up*.
*This does not, of course, absolve users of doing sane things like saving documents that they're working on regularly. Backups only go so far. IT should make sure that your vast repository of documents and email don't get sucked into the abyss if your hard drive goes toes up -- but if you started working on a sales pitch at 9 a.m. and didn't save before you went to lunch and Bob from sales sat on your keyboard and closed Word... well, that's all on you, my friend.