Clients' Responsibility to Backup Data

Clients are responsible for backing up their own personal data on their local machines.

When will clients need to backup their important data?
- When clients request for a rebuild or an upgrade to the Operating System. When a machine is rebuilt or upgraded, the machine will be formatted and ALL data will be lost.
- When the client receives a new machine and need to move data from OLD machine to NEW machine. 
- When a clients machines has security issues such as viruses, has been hacked into and/or has FTP services running on it.

Where and How can clients back up their data? 
- Copy data to your personal network J: Drive
- If machine has a cd_burner, clients can burn data to , you copy data to a cd_rw
- If clients have to much data that will not fit in either of these locations.  They may request temporary space on our server by letting the DST know.  DST will then allot some space and give you instructions on how-to get to this area.  This is temporary space to copy data to this location, and once the machine has been rebuilt or setup, clients need to copy all data back to their local machines hard drive. Data backed up to this temporary location is not backed up and is deleted after 2 weeks.  

What is the simplest way to backup my important data?
- Clients who save all data to their "My Documents" folder ONLY should be able to copy their profile on the their machine. By copying their local profile usually will backup my documents, desktop items, including favorites, and/or personal email folders that are stored locally on the machine.

If clients want to verify that it has been backed up, here are a couple of things that the Desktop Support Technician can check prior to rebuilding clients machine:
- Technicians can check clients outlook settings to verify if clients are using personal email folders and if so, can check where they point too and verify that they are backed up
- Technicians can preview the clients backup of their profile to make sure that favorites, my documents and other standard items are backed up
- Technicians can take a quick look at the root of the C: drive on the machine to see if they see any non-standard folders
- Technicians can perform a quick Advanced Search (include option for hidden files/folders) and search for .pst (Personal Folder), PAB (Personal Address Book) are on the local machine
IMPORTANT: The Desktop Support Technician will not be able to verify that all data has been backed up since clients are the only ones familiar with their own data and where they normally save it too. Desktop Support Technician is not responsible for any lost data.