The Glade 4.0

Apparently one of my staff's computers is due for an upgrade. Fine. She comes back from a 6-month maternity leave next Friday. They wait until TODAY to take her computer, wipe the hard drive with no warning and without backing it up, and now they are telling me they won't have the parts they need until after she returns from leave.

INCOMPETENCE

In fairness to your it dept they probably have mandated deadlines (like the computer has to be returned 1st quarter)

That is not any kind of excuse. They should be planning ahead.

If their IT rules are anything like ours it probably went down something like this:

The computer is stored in an asset database with a registered user. They made multiple attempts to contact the user but as they were on leave they just hit a black hole.
The manager never reassigned the asset to a new user while the person was on leave, so they had no alternate contact information.
As the lease deadline approached they were forced to take action by their own deadlines. Whoevere looked at the computer saw no activity for the last 6 months and assumed the computer was simply due to a force lossed employee. Managers typically 'forget' this step and dont retire equipment assigned to their force-losses, and just keep the computer around as a spare.

That being said, in my environment we would have contacted the manager, however in many companies personnel on leave are reassigned to a leave manager (as they are here) who has no information as to the status of the PC and sometimes ignores such requests. (particularly when they're CC'd not directly targeted by an email)

Oh the stories I could regale of the MIS/IT group at my company...

Let us just say that issues like you are having right there are why my managers recommended I take weekly backups of my favorites (saving them to a flash drive) and everyone in the executive branch of the company is okay with the fact that I use my personal external HDD to keep my own auto archive records from my work PC...

Our MIS/IT group has to ask my group to reboot their equipment because they are not trusted to manage their own devices... These are the guys who locked us out of being able to install programs on our computer even though people above them in the company told them we need to be able to install pingplotter, wireshark, and a few other related programs.

(they are also why I am using a computer that is constantly having major hardware failures, and I have not put in a request to have them fixed...)

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Darksiege
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While I'm sure there are anecdotes such as yours DS, there are other examples as to exactly why users shouldn't have admin rights. (Particularly the cost-to-support Admin users is something like x3 higher than it is non-admin users) There are corp liablity issues where users install unlicensed and/or unsupported software. These type of rules DO Exist for reasons, and they're usually handed down by the heads of IT infrastructure, not by the rank and file whos job it is to clean up messes made by all sides.

Yes.



True, but every employee has a manager. They came to me and asked. I explained where she was, and when she would return. The response was "we should do this while she's out so it doesn't disturb her." Hey, great idea. But why wipe it out without a backup? Why not have your **** together enough to make sure you have the parts?

I found out later that this isn't even an upgrade. They are just wiping her hard drive, all her software, etc, to get rid of Windows XP and install Windows 7. WTF - that's not important. What parts are we waiting for????



No, I never did, because it's still allocated for her. But again, all employees have a manager, so it shouldn't be that hard to find out why someone isn't responding. Go to her manager.



Again, this is just to get Windows 7 installed. No other purpose.



Ok, with the new information - would you wipe the drive without making a backup?

Is it the employee's responsibility to maintain a backup of his/her files?

Neither. No company should be without a backup solution. HD's crash all the time. Either server side storage or server side backups with a regimented backup routine. If the employee was keeping things on a local drive instead of server space, its her fault and she should be disciplined. What would have happened if the drive had gone out?

The network is backed up, naturally, but hard drives are not. So, the point is don't keep work files on your hard drive. She's pretty good about that, I doubt that work was lost.

But I know I have personal crap on my hard drive, and some work related items like software items I like, contacts, some proposals that haven't had a network folder created yet, my resume , and personal emails that I get through work (with photos, etc).

Common courtesy and knowledge of how people actually operate (regardless of the "rules") would require a back up of the hard drive or at least warning that they're going to wipe it with no backup.

I certainly don't think she should be disciplined for leaving personal items on her local drive.

Three issues here:

1) Employee's been gone for 6 months, and will be coming back to either no computer or a computer without the proper software installed (CAD, Microstation, GIS software, and all the misc. engineering software we accumulate). This won't be installed because there won't be enough time to do it if they even get the computer back in time.

This is rude and poor management. As her manager, it's my responsibility, and so I'm pissed off.

2) Personal files are potentially lost.

If she was smart, she took them with her. Still, it's common courtesy to give someone a heads up that they are getting their HD wiped. If her hard drive crashes, it crashes and she loses personal files. That's not my problem, but going out of the way to wipe it is messed up.

3) This is all being done for no legitimate reason. Moving to Windows 7 is not an immediate need, by any stretch.

Actually, it is. XP has been EOL for months, now, and is no longer receiving security updates.

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The main problem here is that your IT policy allows users to save files to their local hard drives. Everything on a local hard drive is volatile information. Hard drive failure rates are very, very high, and local PC drives are not backed up. For laptops, generally, the user's documents folder has some backup and synchronization setup to a network drive, but for desktops, local hard drives are not considered a place where anything should be stored other than the computer image itself.

If I were you, my question would not be "Why didn't you back up the C: drive?" so much as "Why was she allowed to save files to the C: drive?"

Note: if IT comes back at you with a related excuse, "Well, the C: drive isn't where she should be storing files," that doesn't fly, unless they've hidden the C: drive from her and she had found the workaround for this and was intentionally putting data there. If the C: drive is readily available and an obvious place to save data, then its the fault of whoever sets up your domain policies that she's been saving things there. Its only when users are stubborn and too smart for their own good that they'll look for ways around even the simplest protections against saving data to the local drive (such as hiding the drive itself and moving My Documents to a network partition.) Also, saving files to the desktops should always be disabled.

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There's hundreds of machines here. Mine hasn't been upgraded. That particular machine was not an emergency. Go upgrade a different one.

1) Lots of programs must run on the C: drive. If they tried to hide the C: drive, I'd have to immediately reverse that policy.

2) Such no-tolerance policies for personal files, etc. and lack of any type of flexibility for the workers is unacceptable. If a worker wants to store some music, photos for their screensaver and desktop, emailed files from friends, etc., then they can do this. This isn't a sweat shop.



Yeah, um, no. I have no interest in working for a company that's that anal about crap.

This does't stop programs from running on the C: drive, or even using it as a temp-file location. It only stops you from intentionally storing data on the C: drive. No programs force you to save personal data to the C: drive as a storage location.


Sure, but then they canot complain when those files are lost. The C: drive is a volatile storage location. It's a tradeoff.



Ours isn't anal at all. In fact, we let them store that stuff on their network home drive (well, not music or video--the company doesn't want to have to worry whether such files are copyrighted or not. The other stuff, yes.)

I don't think you understand how such a setting works -- it's all transparent to the user. They still save to their documents folder, their pictures folder, etc. Those folders are just located on network file servers instead of the local drives. The only time they get confused is if they go looking for the C: drive, and they can't see it there.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I can install or save anything I want to my work laptop, and it functions like a normal computer, but I'm a software engineer so I guess it's different. I work at a Fortune 100 company.

Developers tend to require local admin rights on their PCs in order to do their job. This is unfortunate, because the majority of them are just as incompetent at actually USING a computer as regular users. Software Development departments are the biggest headache for an IT team. There's no way to protect them from their own incompetence.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I guess I can see that. One of my coworkers (a software engineer) types with two fingers.

Also if I didn't have local admin access, I wouldn't be able to update my Google Chrome.

Yes, they do. We are using some very old dos-based programs that only access your input data from the C drive.



Sure they can complain. It's a dick move to intentionally wipe it without warning. If they lost their files to HD crash, then I agree.



That's pretty cool, but we don't allow that here. Inadequate storage space.

Ah, that could be a concern. We likely have quite a few petabytes of total server space in the company.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I have seen extremes when it comes to help desk, from totally incompetent to could tell me things I didn't know. I usually get on well with them but I don't let them work on my machine. I do too many things that are against company policy at most places. Generally I have to for my job, which was funny in a couple of places where they tried to lock me down and after many arguments that got elevated to the CEO who told them to leave me alone.

While I agree it was a stupid thing for them to do without backing up the drive, anyone that works with computers knows you never store important stuff in one place. At work I have an automatic backup on my documents. I also manually copy everything to at least 2 sometimes three diverse storage systems. I have learned the hard way in the past.

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C drive is SO much faster for access and 200mb xlsx files, etc. NAS to workstation is pure misery

All of my work is done on remote linux servers that I VNC into. So if my harddrive crashed it wouldn't be a huge deal. Doing anything on Windows is a huge pain unless you have an overclocked Sandy Bridge processor. Microsoft products are so clunky.

Personally I'm of a mind that if you're using a server, no personal files should be living on local drives. It just makes the world so much easier.

Also I've tried Linux honestly and repeatedly over the last decade. I've never seen the clouds part and the angels sing while using it, nor have I had an experience that anywhere rivals my windows experience. It's at best been marginally useful as an OS on a CD. I must be doing something wrong.

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