Friday 22 August 2008

IT Support, oh dear

Look, it's a real, real worry when someone with no formal training and only six months of actual professional experience, working part time (this would be me) appears to know more about providing IT support to an organisation than the actual IT Officer of said organisation does.

The latest wonderful fiasco:

While labouring away inside a 15-page document that had taken me a month of two-day weeks to build, Word 2007 decided to crash without warning. Not even a dialogue box saying "Ooops! This piece of shit is crashing now, there's nothing you can do about it but I thought you'd like to now!" Following which, my file had disappeared off the server. And I mean vanished. There wasn't even one of those usually very annoying temporary files that Word could use to rescue the file. In act, when I reopened Word it didn't even realise that something had gone wrong and that it needed to rescue the file.

So I lodge an IT request, and I get a file back off backups. From three weeks previously. With only 8 pages in it. A polite email later reveals that there were actually no backups between 24 July and 11 August, which happened to be the afternoon of the day in which my 15 pages of research disappeared. Hang on, I thought, aren't backups made every afternoon? Apparently, yes. Actually, apparently not. Was nobody checking this? Was nobody even slightly concerned that a server observed to have been a bit flaky in the past wasn't being backed up reliably?

On the other hand, thank the lord for web browser histories. Seeing no need to blank my history at work, I was able to dive back in and unearth the fantastic resources I had found and which I only had the links to within the original document. So there's something I need to change right there, then, along with making my own backups in future...

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