Making Users Back Up Important Data?

Lux Interior asks: "Help! I am the ad-hoc computer guy in a small satellite office of a larger company. We have no CIO, no IT department, and no policies whatsoever as regards data retention or backup. Therefore, a lot of company property exists one place-- on individual hard drives. The office is made of almost entirely of rudimentary users, on WIN98 and 2000 machines, who never, ever, back up any company information. Has anyone out there had experiences in a small-office setting with: changing users' behavior in regards to managing their data; setting up best practices for backing up information properly; and making sure that the most computer-apathetic users comply with what you've put in place?" Sometimes the best way to make users conform to policy is to not give them a choice in the first place. Automated backup systems on each workstation can go a long way in helping this. Which software packages have such functionality (the more unobtrusive, the better)?

"Several weeks ago we lost six years' worth of extremely important data on current and continuing projects that not even a data recovery service could get back. As a consequence, it is now my job to make sure this doesn't happen again. I have an offsite data storage service retained, but now, how do I get people to back up their files to our file server so I can back up our data from one location? (Also, having the data backed up on our file server of course means that most inadvertent deletions can quickly be fixed in-house).

This is all taking place in a Windows environment, with an NT 4.0 file server, and I am far from an experienced Sysadmin. Fun, Fun, Fun.

Any input from slashdot readers would be great, and save me much dyspepsia, insomnia, and general hassle."

Comments

Re:Workstations bad.

[sphealey]

Yeah thats a brilliant idea. Purposefully crash someones HDD to "drive a point home". Suddenly I'm not wondering why your looking for work in your sig.

Sorry dude - have to disagree there. The only way to really test disaster recovery plans is to engineer a "disaster". You have to get approval of directors /dept. heads first of course, but I have certainly showed up at some of my sites at 6 AM, shut down the server, put a red cardboard flame on it, and waited 'till my staff showed up. It is even better when you have the VP of Sales (ex-Marine) stop by every 10 minutes to scream about "money going down the drain". Makes an interesting morning for the staff!

sPh

Re:Workstations bad.

[FreeUser]

Make sure something important was there, that wasn't properly placed onto the fileserver.

That's not testing a disaster recovery plan, that's deliberately destroying user data so you can say "See, I'm right, neener."

Well, not if he just unplugs the drive and puts a scare into the user. Let 'em sweat for a couple of hours, then manage to fix the problem and let them know how incredibly lucky they are the power cord just worked its way loose and it wasn't a real hard drive crash that would have wiped out their data, something that is a lot more common.

It'll drive the point home in a non-destructive manner, which may be the best thing one can do. It is human nature not to learn such lessons until they blow up in your face ... so make it a controlled explosion that just singes the user a little, rather than scattering body parts over a couple of city blocks. (ok, maybe in today's world the explosion metaphore wasn't the best one to use...)