Sage 100

What a day !! Just got off the phone with one of my older clients and I think she reinitialized her AP files. She says no but somebody did - activity report says so.... told her to get the IT guy to restore the back up from last night (hope they have a good back up)... She said ok and was crying... Feel bad for her but what makes them touch these utilities is beyond me.

Did you suggest she follow Beth and start her Friday drinking early??

No but I think I should have!

At least twice I've had someone choose Reinitialize instead of Rebuild. I don't know why Sage even has those warnings pop up - they are an annoyance when you're talking someone through it (because they always want to read you the WHOLE DAMN THING), and apparently customers on their own completely ignore them. Let's just hope her backup is better than my customer's when they reinit'd AR - someone had been in AR the night before during the backup, so the most important files hadn't been backed up - and apparently they weren't changing tapes.

I suppose you could always restrict them from being stupid and take away their reinitializing priveledges.....

Of course, it's usually someone who doesn't have the rights anyway, but because everyone knows everyone else's password because the admin person got tired of having to login to do something for someone with lesser rights...

Well just got off with the IT guy and they think they have a back up but when he went to look we got an error... So he is going to work on it. I don't think she gave anyone else her password. She was getting a error and thought she could fix it and she did - she got rid of all the data. I think she was afraid to say she did it because they might fire her.... It is hard to not give the admin the full rights. They always want to know why, when I try and restrict them from some places... Oh well going to start happy hour.

think they have a back up"". Oh man! Sounds like my day earlier this week.

I had a guy merge vendors once. Problem was, he had the starting and ending vendors as the ones he wanted to merge (this was 3.x). First vendor started with a C and the ending vendor started with an S. Told him to restore. Too bad their first good backup was about a month old...

Yes. Same experience with 1500 inventory items and they wondered why I always harped on making a copy of the company before merging or renumbering.

Fortunately the customer said, ""I guess that's why you always tell us to make a copy before renumbering."" before it slipped out of my mouth.

So you didn't have to be the harper again?

They now always backup before renumbering or merging.

Back in Unix days, we had a MAS customer merge a little over 10,000 customers into one. Took it about 4 hours to restore off of tape. Kind of miss Unix, but I don't miss the tape a bit.

A Tough lesson learned!!

Only"" four hours? Sounds like you had a fast tape drive.

Last year the internal IT guy at a client reinitialized the item file, tried to hide it, and was fired. We are now in charge of all IT. Perhaps clients should include a section in their personnel manuals that covers this type of thing. Unfortunately most of them don't have personnel manuals.

Ouch. What was the reason for the cover up. Too Chicken shxx to own up to it?

Culmination of many similar events. Plus, never mess with the MAS 90 consultants.

Reminds me of the guy who took over when I left my very first job. Something about coming in early to shred the evidence...

Had exact same problem 15 years ago (thank god for one of the few logs MAS keeps). She totally denied it, showed owner the log after they tried to blame us...She was fired. On the subject of backup, it's amazing how many people have bad backups and don't know it. Here's my blog on the topic :) Shameless plug included.. http://www.clientsfirst-us.com/blog/partners-perspective/tech-tips/business-disaster-recovery/

@MarkChinsky Bad backups are the biggest problem. Over the years some of the worst offenders are the third party network consultants. They set it up and never test it or assume the client is taking actions that they never told them to do. Unfortunately I have had more clients who end up with no backup when their server crashes than I would have imagined. The other problems relate to proper security - passwords (some have none!), firewalls and virus protection. We must always assume that clients don't have a clue about these things and as consultants we must watch over the network support group.

@JohnHoyt Check out my demo in the linked blog. If people can't spin up a clone of their entire infrastructure and test it in an isolated scenario, they never really know if they are ready when the worst happens.. And we know (most of them don't), that it's a matter of when, not if.

Then there's the proper level of disaster recovery. I have had clients who could easily be without their systems for a month due to the type of business they ran. Others, however, are so dependent on automated systems that they need a hot site ready for recovery as soon as possible. Most clients are not like either of these, but are unable to easily work manually when their system is unavailable for 2-3 days. For the most part, companies that use MAS 90 choose not to appropriately spend the money or plan for recovery as they should.