I KIND OF AGREE with you. But I would add that statement to individual hard drives. In 20 years of computer use (and probably personally owning a dozen....not counting employer owned hardware) I have NEVER had a hard drive "crash".

Servers "go down", are in maintenance, service and also crash. When you have 300 + people accessing them, you will probably encounter a higher risk of a problem.

FOR EXAMPLE, LOOK AT THE SERVER FOR THIS FORUM....It's slower than it's competition, is down on frequent occassion (oxymoron), is "too busy" to accommodate the users, etc. Frankly, it just plain sucks.

Additionally, and I may be wrong about this now, but it is generally an accepted practice for the employee to save directly related work material to the personal HD (notes, references). Anything that is corporate/department (completed forms, investigations, reports) related to the dedicated server.

Again an example.....at my previous employer I had access to 5 hard drives/servers. First was my laptop HD (C), second was my docking station HD (H), next was the local facilities server (J), next was the Purchasing/Acquisition specific server (Y) and finally was the Corporate wide server (Z). I'm sure there was other specific servers for the individual communities...engineering, technicians, financial, etc. which were batched/uploaded/downloaded to the General Corporate server once a night in the very early morning hours.

Firewalls with password access, allowed entry to anything beyond local facility servers.

Just adding some "thoughts" for Lone Ranger.

 

depending on policy, some server folders don't get backed up for certain file types. My company refuses to backup .pst files on the network drive. Our HR recruiter lost a year+ of contact info because of this unknown policy.

Also, our server folders now get backed up "less frequently"

So my policy is to store it in both places, and DVD backup once a month cuz I don't trust my companies IT department to take care of it for me.

 

Wow, terrible policy!!! But actually, a .pst isn't necessary with Exchange server. Huh...

 

I've got to remember that one!

Yes servers crash, but as has been said they are backed up, or should be. Plus they should have some type of RAID configuration.

How important is the data? If you've gotta have it, put a copy on the server, your PC, burn it to a disk and put a copy on your flash drive. Life happens, computers crash and data gets lost....

 

Exchange server won't help for data over 90 days which has to be put into a personal folder or be lost.