Seems like a risky thread to post on but what the heck. Here's my 2 cents worth. I can't remember all of the turns this thread has taken but here goes:
Every biz is different -- if you don't think you need a backup plan and no one needs to look at your level 3 docs to do their job, fine. That won’t fly with everyone, though. In MY world, servers do go down for more than a half day (3 days recently). Viruses do get past the AV program and knock-out critical files on occasion. There is some small threat that a fire, tornado, or other disaster could hit us. Many of OUR level 3 doc’s. do need to be accessed to know how to do our jobs. Heck, I wrote some of them myself but I still need to reference the doc to remember what it is I said we do! Some of the tests or production steps are quite complex and individual customer focused, so in many cases you need to reference the L3 doc to remember how to do it for a particular customer. There are lots of different customers and a darn near infinite number of part numbers – almost every product is custom. There are also some calculation/simulation programs that save tons of manual calculation that are used almost daily. And not every work station has a computer to access.
So, we put the master on the computer server, have a hard copy backup on site, and send a data backup to an offsite location on CD every week just in case. The cost for this modest “disaster plan” for data is quite small in both time and dollars, and for the cost it is a great insurance policy. If you don’t need it great, do what works for you, but to say as an unqualified blanket statement that no one does or should need to look at procedures/WI’s, etc. to do their jobs is quite shortsighted IMHO.
