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
posted by MIB @ 2:25 PM
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