(The following pertains to office assigned PC's only. Lab PC's are backed up differently.)

It is not possible for us to monitor Windows backups for each and every office system on a daily basis. This is because users often turn off their PC's when going on vacation or in the case of laptops, take them home for the evening and on weekends. Many department systems are also dual boot and it can be a rare instance when such a system is even booted under Windows OS. Indeed, in some dual boot systems, Windows backups may not even be turned on.

However, individual users can check on their Windows backup status themselves as the need presents itself:

Open the Control Panel in the Start menu, double click on the Retrospect Client icon. When the Icon opens, there will be a history window listing dates, times and drives that have been backed up. For example, on my PC, I see that my Status history window shows the last successful backup was for drive G: was on 10/16 at 8:52 a.m. I am on a weekly backup schedule, so this is normal and expected.

There are several other tabs that you can select and use to set preferences for your backups.

The obvious Preferences tab will set an automatic notification window to pop up if a backup has not been performed within a certain period of time, or after a successful backup completes.

We recommend at least 10 days before notification for weekly scheduled systems, 3 days for daily scheduled systems. Individual office systems are not backed up on weekends. You (and most others) are on a daily (M->F) evening backup schedule.

The Access tab allows you to exclude specific files and folders from being backed up.

The Proactive Backup tab allows you to postpone a backup. But is of little use, since if you bypass a scheduled backup time, we don't come back to you. We also run backups after normal office hours, so most folk do not need to postpone backups.

Finally, that a backup was performed does not mean that any particular file was backed up. Certain data, tmp, and log files--especially if left open and in use by programs, may not be backed up. Cache files are purposely excluded. Other files may just not be picked up (it happens rarely, but it happens).

If there is a file or a folder of great importance, send Lab the path and file name (e.g., E:SoftwareBosNews_777470fea4BosNews) and we'll restore it to a special area on your PC for you to examine. We'll get some file restore practice, and you'll get some peace of mind.

The Lab staff will be happy to sit with you and discover where important data may reside on your PC (not everything may reside where you think it does)