The situation
An engineering business in Melbourne’s south-east called us about a file server making “a noise it hadn’t made before.” That server held something close to the entire value of the business: a decade of CAD drawings, job files and customer history. The backups, when we checked, had been silently failing for months.
What we did
First, the fire: we imaged the failing drives that night and verified every byte before touching anything else. Then the foundations — a new server with proper redundancy, a structured drawing archive with sensible permissions, and backups running on a local-plus-offsite pattern with scheduled restore testing.
Then the part nobody plans for: the business kept calling. The CAD workstations, the email, the workshop Wi-Fi, the quoting software, the new starter’s laptop. At some point the question changed from “can you fix this?” to “can you just look after all of it?”
The outcome
Today we operate as their technology department on a flat monthly arrangement. Hardware is refreshed on a plan instead of a panic, the drawing archive has survived two disk failures without anyone downstairs noticing, and the server room no longer makes noises it hasn’t made before.
The day we proved a restore worked was the day the owner stopped thinking about IT. That’s the actual product.