A Customer's Computer Died
A long time customer's store POS system computer died the other day. The computer was probably 15 or so years old. The customer had bought his MIB software outright when he purchased the system. He purchased telephone support as needed. The last time that he needed telephone support was seven years ago. He probably only needed support a couple other times in the last 15 years and as a result was careless with his backups. Sadly his backups were no good. On the plus side, he removed his hard drive from his old computer and shipped it to us. It was easy to get his data off his old hard drive. He was going quickly with our latest software and the new computer that he bought locally. All was not perfect because his other workstations were not working. It turned out that he had two bad cables to his workstations. Finding the bad cables required plenty of hair pulling and teeth gnashing. That could have been the reason that his old computer died. Now all of his workstations are going and hopefully it all runs for another 15 years.
Labels: backups, data recovery, Store POS System
Reliability and Backups
Lately there has been heavy flooding in parts of TN and KY. I happened to talk with a store manager in that area during the flooding. She said that the electricity had been out part of the day and they couldn't run invoices on their store POS system. Moreover, they couldn't price most items in the store. Essentially, they couldn't run any cash sales. They were reduced to writing hand tickets for charge sales only listing the customer name, quantities and part numbers. These hand tickets were run later. That got me to thinking about the importance of reliability. Some 30+ years ago when personal computers were just starting to be widely available, the systems were not reliable. The systems ran on floppy disks. The diskettes and floppy drives themselves went bad. If users did not make good backups, then it was almost a sure thing that they would soon face serious data loss. People knew backups were important. About the same time as the flooding in TN and KY an associate upgraded a customer's computer. They have been using our system for over 20 years and have never been down. Here is a situation where increased reliability might make serious data loss more likely. It is hard to convince somebody that hasn't had a computer crash in over 20 years that it is important to make good backups. We knew that we had a potential problem with people forgetting about their backups. Our solution was to put the date of the last good backup on the main computer screen. It is visible every day for most of the day. The user has to choose to ignore the warning. It is like your gas gauge flashing a warning on low fuel. Ignore this warning at your own peril.
Labels: backups, reliable computers, Store POS System
Keep Control While on Travel
Many store owners or managers want to control their store even when they don't show up for work. It is easy to do and the cost is minor. This can be a real godsend for those that have to be gone for health problems, family matters, long overdue vacations or whatever. You only need a fixed address for your internet connection, any of the widely available inexpensive software packages designed for this application, a laptop computer and an internet connection where you are staying while away from work. The biggest expense is the laptop and there are many new ones that are under $400. If you want to print reports, you will have to bring along a printer and you can get good new laser printers for under $130. Be sure to save the boxes so that you can ship them to your destination with minimal hassle. Most hotels and motels, many restaurants and even airports have wireless internet connections available. Sitting in your home, hotel room or vacation home you can use your Store POS System to do almost everything that you could if you were sitting in your office working on the computer. The one important thing that you can't do is to remove your backup media and put it in a safe place. Hopefully, an employee will do this for you. Oh yes, the users that I know of that manage from remote locations have not had any problems with computer viruses. However, one would do well to resist the temptation to surf the web on either your server computer at the office or your laptop for remote computing.
Labels: backups, computer viruses, Manage while you are gone, Store POS System
Check Your Backups Automatically
Since we first started in 1977, we have been concerned about our customer's backups. When all is said and done, the data in your computer is usually worth much more than the computer itself. Lately we have implemented a change that displays the date of your last good MIB backup on top of our main menu. It is not something that is easy for you to ignore. In some cases the owner or manager does not run the backups. They have to rely on an employee doing the backups properly. Now every day it is plain for all to see if the backups were run properly at the last end of the previous day. Now if we could only figure out if they took the backups home or to some other safe place.
The importance of good backups was really brought home to us by hurricane Ike when it hit Galveston, TX. Our customer in Galveston had survived hurricanes in the past and was reasonably sure that this would be the case again. Just in case they made two sets of backups just before they left on the day the hurricane hit. Both backups were good. Those backups were important because the water ended up being 5 feet deep inside their building. Almost everything in the building was a total loss. Once they had a new computer in hand they were up and going within two minutes of inserting their flash drive backup into their new computer. Without those backups there would have been no way to recover their accounts receivable and to furnish an up to the minute value of their inventory. An unexpected benefit of their backups came to our customer's customers. Our customer's customers had also lost their paperwork and did not have backups for their receivables. Our customer was able to furnish their customers with copies of invoices for parts and labor that our customer had done for their customer. That customer was in turn able to bill their customers for completed work.
Labels: backups
