From The Helpdesk: Protect your data!

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Protect your data!

Here's a cautionary tale that I heard on the net.

We had an incident that, not to get into much HR related stuff, appears to be a fired employee(s) initiating a mass deletion of files off the shared folder on the file server (over 100 GB). I happened to be looking at the file system at the time I started seeing all the files disappearing. Shortly after, I got calls from users that files were gone.

Anyone who has files shared by more than a couple very trusted users needs to read this type of article every couple months. It can happen to anyone either through malice, ignorance (that's a polite way to say "incompetence"), or accident. Poof - and years of work are gone.

Of course, that won't be a big deal since you all have good and current backups of your current data. A couple hours and it's all back where it belongs.

Even so, organizational and administrative practices - even for home users - will help minimize the likelihood of this happening to you and reduce the total lost time when it does.

Organization - Know what and where your data are. Did you let your bookkeeping program put it's data somewhere deep in a hidden folder? Do you have momentary notes and personal letters mixed in with archival documents? Where do you keep data that should be available to all users?
Permissions - Since we quit using Windows 98, we've been able to restrict who may view or change data on a file or folder basis. Are you using this capability to protect sensitive HR or financial files (or your paystub) from users who shouldn't be reading this information (your kids)?
Backup - Now that you've got everything straightened out administratively, you need to protect it against physical disaster.

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Labels: backup, security

¶ 10:24 AM

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I've worked in Windows support over 10 years and many people come to me with all sorts of random questions. When I complete a particularly comprehensive correspondence on a particularly common issue, I'll post it here. There are hundreds of other blogs and sites that do the same thing, but another opinion doesn't hurt. Many of my offerings may contain content from others. If I used primarily one resource, I try to reference it. If you think I've misappropriated your work, please let me know.

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Most of the examples shown here can be downloaded from http://3500calories.info/links_blogger/. "Numbers for Everyone" is not about math; it's barely about arithmetic. It's merely an attempt to promote a literacy about numbers. We should apply a healthy skepticism to everything we read, but many people think they aren't good at math, so they take any statement with numbers totally at face value. This allows, even enables, a lot of fallacious (bogus) "knowledge" to be disseminated without challenge.

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