The glory of network drives.

I am out of the office (sick), but had some work that needs to get done, but that is part of why I have a work laptop. I tried to get online and can see my email and I have access to some shared files, but not "MY" files that I work on daily.

I've had this problem before. "my" drive will drop out even though the rest of the remote access is working fine. When I call the help desk they tell my to turn it off and back on. So I don't bother calling and turn it off and back on. Several times. So I drag my sick self into the office to get the files I need. I can't get into the "my" drive there either. So I break down and call the help desk. and get "We cannot answer your call at this time due to a high call volume as a result of the Kirkwood server being down. If that is your problem, please hang up. General announcements will be made when the situation is resolved. All other callers..."

There are a number of servers, of course, but the "Kirkwood" server is one that handles all the individuals that work in my building, so I go home, eat lunch and take a nap.

A co-worker sends me this update. "We are not expecting a quick recovery of this server and the outage is expected to go through the night and possibly into Thursday. We expect to have a better assessment of recovery time in the morning. We will provide an update tomorrow morning at 8 a.m." Today is Tuesday! It's already been down a full day.

I appreciate that there is a benefit to having the automatic backing up that a network provides, but one would assume there are backup systems in place in case the server fails. The main reason to have a network drive and they screw it up. Hundreds of people with little or nothing to do. I wish I wasn't sick and could enjoy some in office down time. I might have even cleaned my desk.

As a special treat the new laptop has a feature that will automatically backup files stored on the hard drive to the network. That feature is disabled to encourage people to use the network. I manually save some things on the hard drive, but only those I plan to need.