It’s been said that there are two types of computer users. Those who have lost data contained on their hard drive, and those that will. 

Western Steel Erectors had been fortunate – until they weren’t. On the Friday before Monday’s payroll deadline, a hard drive crashed. That’s when an emergency call was made to Bryson Computers.

“This was a problem we needed to have taken care of immediately,” said Mike Sutton, senior project manager. “We absolutely had to recover the information from the hard drive.”

Quick Action Required

Sutton called Bryson
Computers after  repeatedly attempting to get his server to start with the same dismaying
results each time. Owner Terry Bryson made an on-site visit only to find that the disk was too corrupted to recover the information.

Western Steel Erectors – known for building high-rise buildings in the western US maintains eight workstations for its staff. The company uses its computer system for general business applications, accounting, cost analysis and construction plans.

Problems continued after Bryson attempted to restore the hard drive back at his office.

“I found that several backup disks I’d been given by Western Steel Erectors were incomplete,” he said. “This is very common at small businesses, where people think their backup is complete but they don’t know because they’ve never used it.”

After pulling bits and pieces from several of the backup disks, Bryson was able to recover the majority of the current data.

A Familiar Tale

Sutton’s scenario is all too common at smaller businesses. In addition to overseeing the
operations of most major projects, he was also charged with serving as a quasi system
administrator.

“Western Steel Erectors had always tried to save a little money,” said Sutton, referring to his additional responsibility. “And when we had called computer techs in the past they
didn’t always know what they were doing.”

Quite the opposite proved true with Bryson Computers. After meeting with Sutton on
Sunday to set up two temporary workstations so payroll could be processed, the duo began to look at ways to avoid a repeat of data loss.

After a thorough examination of Western Steel Erectors’ existing infrastructure, Bryson noted that the 7-year-old hardware was inadequate to run a newer version of Windows. Without
upgrading the software, the company would be unable to reduce spamming. Management of the old system was difficult and confusing. It was also decided that the backup needed to be brought up to date.

A New, Managed System

Western Steel Erectors’ updated system
includes:

A custom-built server with dual Xeon processors, 4 Gbytes of RAM,
mirrored 500 Gbyte hard drives for redundancy, and the Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 Suite.

Cloudmark spam filter.

AVG antivirus.

A full-system backup on an external hard drive. The server monitors the backup and sends Sutton a report if there are any problems.

To compliment the onsite backup, datashoot.com remote backup is
employed. “Now, if they have a problem with theft, flood or fire we can download the data to a new server and have them up and running in no time,” Bryson said.

After flirting with disaster, Sutton has turned the management of his system over to Bryson Computers. “Terry knows what we need better than we do,” he said. “Even though I’ve
always held it close, it makes me comfortable not to worry anymore about our computer
system.”

About Bryson Computers

Bryson Computers is geared toward the needs of small businesses. Our team of professionals can provide hardware, software, support
services, online backup, hosting and Internet.

For more information:

Phone: 866-486-6111

www.brysonnet.com
sales@brysonnet.com