So, while patchinig and cleaning up our corporate server of tons of extra cruft, and trying to ensure that our disk drives were being backed up, I found that
Past Perfect, which we use for almost everything, was installed on the server. Now, we all use PP4 for almost everthing -- museum collections, library holdings, keeping track of donors and memberships and mailings and everything. Eventually I'll start cataloging our accessions and archival collections into it as well. It's a great piece of software for small museum/library/archives organizations that have to use Windows [ick]. We are pretty much out of business without it. So, thinking to myself: "Nobody should ever log onto the server to use this software" and "All the data, binaries, etc. are on the network drive" ... I uninstalled it. Then I rebooted the server, started the backups, and went home for the weekend.

Tuesday, when everyone came to me complaining that they couldn't get into PP4 (I am the I.T. guy since I took it upon myself to dismiss our former I.T. consultant for "total lack of a clue."), I looked at the network stuff, completely forgot about uninstalling, and told them that it wasn't anything I had done. When our PP4 admin talked to Pastime Software's tech. support, all of a sudden I remembered. Doh! Double-Doh! That was a Bad Thing to Do! Fortunately, we had good backups of our PP4 system, and with some help from tech. support, we got everything back eventually.

I offered to dismiss myself as our current I.T. guy for "utter carelessness" immediately, but nobody will have that until I hire someone with a clue to do the I.T. stuff.

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