In the late 1980s when local area PC networks started to take off, the client PCs would typically boot from a directory configured on the server, or from a local boot PROM, or floppy drive. I believe configuration was driven in this direction primarily because of the cost of hard drives. As a result, the only medium for mass data storage was the main server and this tended to be backed up fairly regularly, if not religiously. Interestingly, users often worked from a floppy disk, so if their data wasn’t backed up on the server, it was saved to floppy disk. I still have memories of the accounts ladies backing up the accounts data unfailingly every night to about three or four floppy disks.

In recent years, there has been a growing trend for users to save their data to their local hard drives, connecting to the main server primarily for email, internet access, messaging and printing facilities, and to access the company database. I couldn’t possibly hope to cover all the psychological and technical reasons for this, but the main factor that springs to mind is that because network throughput speed has not matched the exponential increase in hard drive capacity, saving large multimedia files to a centralised location can take a frustratingly long time; it’s easier and quicker to save these large files locally. When you bring laptop computers into the equation, the potential becomes even more serious, due to the portability factor in laptops.

It’s worth bearing in mind that, fifteen years ago, users’ data files were measured in kilobytes. Now, 300MB is not uncommon. Bring video editing into the equation, and it becomes Gigabytes.

There are many backup solutions on the market that will backup the server data, as well as any computers connected to the server. However, in reality this practice doesn’t materialise, as many companies don’t back up during the day and at night, when the tapes are running, the users have left for the day, with their data on their laptop.