Don't ignore it.

I got called out to a customer a couple of days ago.  They were concerned about their backup.

They have nice server set up with a RAID 5 configuration.  They use Acronis to make image backups nightly.

Somehow they had discovered that they hadn't had a successful backup in over 10 months!  They wanted me to figure out why.

Upon checking out their system it appeared that their lack of backup was due to the fact that they had changed the password of the account that Acronis was using to obtain the permission necessary to perform the backup.  Thus when Acronis attempt to run its scheduled backup, it failed as it was providing the server with an incorrect password.

My check, though, also revealed that their RAID 5 configuration (using 3 drives) had a bad hard drive... thus their RAID was in a degraded mode... it was not providing fault tolerance!  If another drive were to fail they'd have to resort their last backup (that was over 10 months old!).

We replaced the failed drive and crossed our fingers... for the next 96+ hours.  It took over 4 days to rebuild the RAID!

We set up an account for Acronis to use exclusively (so no one would accidentally change the password) and got in a good backup.

I final step was to present them with a quote to monitor, at least, their backups.

My customer got lucky... and a lesson was learned.  Computers are not like televisions (that are fairly maintenance free).  You need to maintain your computer...  keep an eye on it.

My customers original computer guy did all the right things.  He set up the server with a fault tolerant RAID and scheduled a nightly backup...  Stuff happens.  That's why you need to keep tabs on it.

First Post!

Hello everyone!  I'm Sheldon Livingston and I started this blog July 16 2011 and this website July 11.  The spirit behind this site is to help, in any way that I can, to keep your computer(s) running safe. 

Please subscribe and let me know if there is anything that I need to address!

Safe computing!