Remember those quaint news agent stores where you paid the cashier a dime for your daily paper, and the cash register's "ka-ching" rang out as you exited? Well, how old are you, geezer? It's the 21st century. Time to wake up and smell the virtual coffee.

The hero of this "true IT blooper" urged his boss to computerize. So, he was under the gun when a backup glitch caused his company to lose two days worth of digital sales data. That's why our protagonist, who submitted this tale to SearchWindowsManageability, chooses to remain anonymous. We'll call him Clark Kent.

Kent works for a three-store retail news dealer. When he started working for the company, the stores used old-fashioned manual cash registers. For months, Kent tried to convince his boss that computerization would pay for itself by reducing labor and increasing accounting accuracy. His campaign finally succeeded, and the stores' cash registers rang their last ka-chings.

The company bought a CTN Systems' point-of-sale (POS) system designed specifically for news agents. With the system from United Kingdom-based CTN, each store has two PC-based tills. In each store, the tills are networked to a PC server. All of the machines are leased from and are periodically updated by CTN.

As Kent predicted, the POS system offered time- and labor-saving features. "The PC in the main store is capable of automatically dialing in to each store during the night, collating the data and producing an overall file for the day's trade," explained Kent.

The backup process was simple. The main store's PC collected all the data, and the manager of that shop backed up the data onto a floppy disk after the stores closed. Then, he put the disk and the day's takings in the company safe. The disk contained information about retail and delivery customers, as well as outstanding debts and sales statistics needed for completing orders.

The system worked for three years with no problems. Kent arguments about the advantages of computerization were validated. There was a bit of glory, and he basked in it.

Of course, the system's spotless record and Kent's moment in the sun couldn't last forever.

Dark clouds appeared on the horizon at the end of one leasing period. At that time, CTN announced an upcoming revision of its POS software. The new version would be Windows-based, a change from the legacy software's DOS foundation. In anticipation of this, when the news dealers' equipment lease expired, CTN replaced all the existing DOS-based PCs with new Windows-based IBM SurePOS systems.

This switch changed the news dealer's backup process, and Kent wasn't sure he liked the new way. Since the SurePOS machines do not have floppy disk drives, CTN would do a remote backup of the news agent's data every twelve hours. "Despite having some misgivings, I agreed to this system," said Kent. "All the stores were (scheduled to be) updated on the same day."

The figurative storm broke when an consultant/engineer came in to switch all sites to the new system. Unfortunately, he used a faulty install script. So, in the evening, when the main PC contacted each store, it didn't request and obtain each store's data and then reset the values for another day's trading. Instead, it reset the values then copied the file before it obtained the data. "This meant that CTN, which does its backup by retrieving the collated file from our main PC received a blank file," said Kent.

Arriving the following morning, Kent switched on the POS to find three blank files and no data. "After waiting four hours for an engineer to travel cross-country, we were able to hook up a floppy drive," he said. "With no back ups for the day before, we had to use two-day old backups."

Then, for eight hours, Kent and five other shop workers watched video recordings from the surveillance cameras trained on the retail chain's six tills. They had to peruse each customer's purchases, determine the method of payment, and correct the accounts accordingly.

If you think this was a simple process, you're wrong. "There were around 4,500 transactions per till that day," Kent said.

So, while Kent is still gung-ho about modernizing the store's systems, he thinks twice about throwing away an old technology that works well. "Needless to say, we now have external floppy drives attached to each PC," said Kent.

Kent readily admits that manually backing up data with floppies is so 20th century. So what? After all, his company is still making a good living with a 17th century innovation: the newspaper.

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