[Jewelry making - Article 00927] - Re: [Orchid] Customer communication problems

[Don Rogers]

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>      How many other people have had similar situations happen to
>     them?Lost emails... crashes etc. Daniel Grandi 

    Daniel, everyone who owns a computer has either had, or will have a
    crash resulting in the loss of data.  Prior to going into the
    jewelry business, I was in the service business for computers of all
    sizes for thirty years.  Computers fail, either from a component
    going bad or a software problem (including viruses).  The Key here
    is a religious back up of your data.  Every day or more often. 

    With 6 computers networked together, It might be wise to get a
    seventh and set it up as a RAID server.  IE it would be your data
    warehouse and every byte of data that is written to it is paralleled
    to a second drive.  If one fails, the other is still there with all
    data intact.  This will prevent the loss of data because of a
    hardware failure, but it won't protect you if a virus gets loose in
    your systems.  Here, a good virus program is necessary.  Neither of
    these protections will do you very much good if your problem is due
    to someone with a lot of confidence and little knowledge who tries
    to "tune" your machine. To guard against this, you need a good
    network administration process, where only selected people can do
    real damage. 

    The backup is really key.  I had this pointed out to me just a
    couple weeks ago when a virus got loose in my network and it took me
    about 80 hours to recover all the data.  None was lost, but the
    nature of the virus forced me to format hard drives so I had to
    manually retrieve the data from them before formatting.  When I went
    to my backup CD's, I was astounded to see that they were over a year
    old, and of little use at that point.  SO, do as I say, not as I
    did. 

    While I was going through my ordeal, a friend who has a small
    business doing CAD drawings of commercial building HVAC systems had
    a hard drive fail, loosing over 80 hours of drawing work as well as
    address, emails, Etc.  He sent the drive off for data recovery and
    found that it was going to cost several thousand dollars to get
    "some of the important data" off the failed drive. Even if you can
    find a magic solution to a failed drive, it is going to be very
    costly. 

    As to how your customers will react, it depends.  If a long time
    customer is affected, they might understand that this is not
    something that you were in full control of and not at all expected. 
    In your situation with a potential new customer, it could be seen as
    "the dog ate my homework" type of excuse for not delivering. 

Don Rogers 

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