Paper Records in an Electronic World


by Edward Duval - Date: 2006-12-11 - Word Count: 504 Share This!

In my fifteen years in the computer industry I have seen far too many businesses lose their data to realize data backup isn't a fail-safe enterprise. We had a guy who owned an auto shop who brought his system in and said it was dead. We took a look at it and realized the power supply had overheated (the fans were clogged) and it had cooked out the system. The CPU fan had also been clogged heavily and combined with the death of the fan in the Power Supply it delivered a fatal blow to the system. We removed the hard drive and tried to read it. The partition had been damaged and the files unreadable. Now we have a whole lot of tricks we can do with a hard drive to recover the data. Please trust me when I say the man's data was not recoverable by anything less than sending it to a recovery center and acquiring a $5000.00 bill for the data.

Before we had exhausted all our efforts we were given the man's data backup tapes. He had three of them and had religiously been switching them out every day since he started using the system. The funny thing was he had never switched the little lever that write protects the tapes. So for several years he had steadfastly performed a ritual that made him feel safe, but did absolutely nothing. We assume the software for backup was probably never setup properly but the company that sold him the system was long out of business (I wonder why?).

Truth told we spent far more effort than we were paid for, all in an effort to help this man recover his data. In the end he almost had a breakdown when we told him there was nothing we could do. We went so far as to send him to another repair center to verify our findings. The saddest part of this wasn't seeing a grown man almost cry but was knowing if he had kept better paper records his fears wouldn't be founded. He never printed himself a copy of his invoices, he had nothing more than his bank records and a few generic printouts. All of his sales records, customer data and tax information were lost.

This is only one example I can give of one of my customer's who relied too much on their computer systems. There is a beauty and power in paper and I have always been a file keeper. Sure my desk has multiple computer systems on it and I make my living in the electronic world. But I also have file cabinets off-site that I archive my records in. There is a power in being able to open a folder and pull out a receipt or a signed document. I'm all about the electronic world and the power it has for data keeping. But at the end of the day I feel a whole lot more comfortable knowing I can touch the records as well as read them.


Related Tags: restaurant software, handheld point of sale, pos, point of sale software

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