IT Folks Make Errors? No!!

I love TechRepublic’s 10 Things posts, and 10 dumb things IT pros do that can mess up their networks is a great one.

It’s fun to tell those user stories, but most of us have dumb moment stories of our own.

Point #1, however, is critical.  We all know it.  You have to have backups, good backups, and a good recovery plan.

I would add to this the very great need to communicate with users.  In many cases I end up doing only part of the work on a small network.  I like to manage everything or nothing, but sometimes clients like to do their own thing and then call me in when there are problems.

Knowing how things are actually being done can change the frequency of backups for various stations.  For example, I personally like to have a single station/drive even on a small peer-to-peer network on which all business related data is stored.  Everybody gets their folders on this drive.  Then stations can be backed up less frequently, while that main drive is paranoically backed up, normally with one offsite backup, daily onsite backups and/or shadow copies.

But when you’re not on site, as is my situation, you never know what users may have decided to do in the meantime.  So communication is a key, especially in contract work such as mine.