Friday, 27 January 2012

The Spike in the Steering Wheel

Someone once said to me that the best safety device they could install in a car would be an 8 inch spike sticking out of the middle of the steering wheel. It would certainly make sure that we all took a lot more care over our driving and left enough distance to stop!

The same could be said for backing up.

The other day a friend of mine had the thrill of a blue screen on his laptop – no problem, he didn’t really read the message, just turned it off and turned it back on again.

OMG! It got worse, it wouldn’t boot – it said that it couldn’t find a bootable device. Panic set in, as he hadn’t backed up or created a restore disk.

The long and the short of the experience was that eventually, after taking the battery out and trying to boot from the install disc (no luck), the PC staggered back to the point where he could undertake a safe start-up. He immediately backed up. Subsequently and for no apparent reason the laptop booted properly and he diligently created all the necessary restore resources. He still has no idea what went wrong.

The point of this story is that for a non-technical, "it won’t happen to me" kind of guy this short sharp shock has completely changed attitudes to finding out what his business has in the way of making sure the risk of system failure does not compromise his work. We have been able to advise him on how to structure his business back up strategy to cater for the centralised and mobile resources and give him the resilience and peace of mind he suddenly discovered he needed!

Perhaps Operating Systems should build this kind of “spike in the steering wheel” into the software to shock us into realising the importance of a working back up strategy.

I’d be interested in hearing of any other stories of a similar ilk.

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