Are Your Documents Really Being Backed Up?

Once upon a time, there was a Treatment Coordinator (O.K. -- it was me!) who created a lot of documents, Excel spreadsheets, marketing material, etc. and carefully saved them to the My Documents folder on the computer in the Exam Room. I assumed (we all know how this story will end) that the individual My Documents folders on each computer were all being backed up as part of the daily backup. One day the hard drive of the Exam computer crashed. I happily called our Hardware Tech to ask where my documents were backed up only to find that the My Documents folder had never been backed up. All my hard work (that was not part of the MergeDocs folder on the Server) was gone.

I have since been in many ViewPoint offices and have only been in one office where the individual My Documents folders were actually part of the daily backup. The moral of this story is take the time and call your Hardware Tech! Typically the easiest way around this problem is to create a Shared Docs folder on the Server and then create individual folders for each person or topic (Marketing, Financial, etc.). The advantage to doing this rather than backing up each My Documents folder is that it also makes it easier to find the originals of documents, but I'll leave that discussion for you and the Hardware Tech.

If this story made you gasp, you are probably one of those hard workers carefully saving a lot of information in My Documents. If sharing this story keeps one person from having to experience that horrifying realization that everything is gone... it will almost make my experience worthwhile.