| Usually, working in the technology industry is not a very scary occupation. After all, I’ve never heard of anyone getting seriously injured by a computer or software. However, a few things I’ve experienced or heard over the years are very scary. I want to share a few of these stories and will change the names to protect the guilty. |
| I will admit this first story is all on me. A long time ago, when we still used the DOS operating system, I was helping a customer clean up their computer and accidentally stepped them through how to delete all the files on their hard drive. As soon as they hit “Enter,” I realized what I had done, told them not to do anything on their computer until I got there, hopped in my car, drove to their location, and recovered everything I had them delete. That was a bit scary. |
| Here are some other scary things I’ve heard from customers: |
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“I just got a new computer and am using the old, outdated software. Since I no longer have the original program disks and don’t want to update, I’ll just use the old computer for my accounting.” So, what happens when the old computer dies? |
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At a January trade show, I heard, “I guess I should start putting in last year’s accounting data.” |
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“My hard drive crashed. Can you help me get my data back? I don’t have a current backup.” We are happy to help install the program on a new computer and restore data from a recent backup, but we can’t recover data from a destroyed drive. |
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| I hope we didn’t hear these things from anyone reading this, but take a moment to think about what it would take (cost) to reenter months or years of data, and make sure you never put yourself in a position where this is necessary. |