How System Administrators Can Be Heroes–Daily

Corporate computer users are most of the time blissfully unaware of how hard IT personnel work to keep a system up and smoothly running daily. For some reason, it’s only in the time of emergency or catastrophe that IT shows up on a user’s radar–and an opinion of all IT people everywhere is usually formed upon the result of that emergency or catastrophe. It would be a good education for the average user to spend a day over in an IT department just watching what goes on, but since that’s not likely to happen anytime soon, opinions of IT–and sometimes IT job security–will continue to depend on how well and how quickly users are rescued from emergencies, even though many such emergencies are self-created.

A common frantic helpdesk call is “I accidentally deleted a very important file! Help!” Suddenly work for some IT person comes to a grinding halt. With blind hope they have the user check the Windows Recycle Bin–but the file is probably not going to be there since most files these days are saved over a network to a server, and the Windows Recycle Bin cannot recover files saved over a network. With a sigh of resignation, the IT person next begins an extensive search through the last backup.

If the file was created prior to the last backup, at least some of the work can be recovered. If the file was created afterward, however, the user will be stuck having to re-create the whole thing. In either case, it’s going to mean extra work for the user, and that user is probably going to be cursing the IT department the whole while. “With all the technology at their disposal, why don’t they have some way of recovering an accidentally lost file?” And the IT department can do nothing but shake their heads sadly at the lack of user education and proceed about their work.

What the IT personnel may not be aware of, however, is that there is technology to cover such eventualities and to make it possible to instantly recover those lost files. Advanced data protection technology exists which replaces the Windows Recycle Bin with one of its own, and files deleted over a network can be instantly recovered. With such technology, hours of aggravation for the IT department, as well as user frustration, can be completely eliminated. If a user accidentally deletes a file, it can be immediately recovered with the click of a mouse.

This same technology also allows for the retrieval of earlier versions of other file types which normally cannot be recovered in any circumstances, such as earlier, over-written versions of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.

With an advanced data protection solution implemented, that same frantic phone call can be answered with a bored, “Simply click on this icon. You’ll see your file in there.” And miraculously, the IT person is the hero of the day.