It was a Fortune 50 IT consulting company. And it worked very well. The organization used Lotus Notes as the main tool for email and document storage, essentially all of the business, which meant that the central units stored the basic Notes databases there. The only documents for the individual consultant were her/his own documents that were work papers prior to being entered in Notes. As I said, backups of user data on individual machines were the responsibility of the employee. Backup of the central Notes servers were the responsibility of central tech management. So if an employee came in with hardware issues, the tech staff either replaced the unit or the drive and restored the approved image. Then the employee could restore from his own backups those work papers. If they didn't have a backup, they would have to redo the work. What most of us did was to work in Word or Excel, for example, and as soon as the document was saved, store it in the Notes database for that client. That way the most you could lose in a catastrophic failure would be a document "in flight." People who didn't take care of their work papers didn't tend to be there very long. I think the most I had to backup for myself was a couple of hundred meg at any one time. I tended to do my work within the Notes framework, even for draft and "thought" pieces. Just easier to do it that way. My data to backup was more along the lines of expense items, maybe some personal data about preferred hotels/restaurants/etc (I was a road warrior, on the road 48 weeks/year. I put my backups on flash cards, mostly. In the seven years I spent on the road I had one hard drive failure and one logic board failure. In both cases I was issued a new Thinkpad and sent on my way. I restored my personal data from the backup and was back in business within hours. About the only really critical information I needed was the security file I needed to log into Notes. But if that got lost, the IT guys could reset the password and make a new security file for me. Had to go through a boss to get it delivered to me, which made it awkward because I was on the road, but it never really caused any issues for me. I learned to keep multiple copies of that critical security file in different locations. There wasn't any risk to doing that because all that encrypted file got you was access to the login process for Notes, which was AFTER login to my account on the Thinkpad. So if a bad guy got the security file, it really didn't do them any good because the data on the file tied my login on my local machine to the central security for the Notes server to allow it to show the login screen, where I had to log in with a different user name and separate password.
I suspect in big pharma, as in other businesses, there are different rules, mostly because the data that may be on the machines may be more critical to projects/drugs in development. And maybe big pharma doesn't want to use a central database system like Lotus Notes, but for us, it worked extremely well. I seem to recall having about 40-50 databases, one for each client for whom I did consulting. Might have been more, it's been a while...
Bottom line, backup strategy is not a "one size fits all" proposition. The approach and tools need to be configured to fit the individual needs.
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