Day Five: Nomad Homeless Advice and Support Unit

Our final challenge of the week was to perform a ‘Complete PC Backup’ onto an external hard drive.

″Sounds easy″, said our Human Resource Manager, so she was given the task!

All went smoothly…….to start with. The external hard drive was really easy to set up – she just had to plug it in and it installed itself. Using that brilliant search feature again to find the backup centre, she typed in ‘ba…’, the results popped up and away she went!

She discovered that Vista has a ‘Backup and Restore’ Centre, which acts as a ‘1 click’ way of accessing all backup and restore features.

The ‘Backup and Restore Centre’ was incredibly user friendly. It asked, in plain language, did we want to ‘backup’ or ‘restore’. It even had a handy link to a help page, asking us ‘Which type of backup should I make?’ where she learned that we should do a ‘Complete PC Backup’ on setting up the laptop, and then it recommended repeating this every 6 months.

Opting for ‘backup’ took her through the process in a series of clear steps.

There were two options, either to ‘Back up files’ or ‘Back up computer’

‘Back up files’ was not the challenge for today, but she was curious to see how this feature could help us to improve on our current file back ups.

She found we could schedule our back ups at a time to suit us and easily change this to a more suitable day and time as and when. At the moment we can’t do these ourselves and have to spend time and money getting in outside PC help, even if we just want to change our backup day.

Backing up the laptop was our challenge today. Using Vista’s ‘Help’ feature, she found that this kind of back up is useful for if your computer breaks (not unheard of at NOMAD with our less than modern machines), as it will restore your entire system.  Due to the sensitive nature of our data we are pleased to note that a password is required to backup providing extra security.

She was unable to complete the backup initially, as the hard drive was not ‘formatted with NTFS’!! (What??!!). This was a real test of Vista’s Help and Support centre as she hadn’t got the first idea what this meant, so didn’t know where to start looking. Following the easy on screen instructions she converted the hard drive to NTFS format, and tried again and this time backed up successfully.

Now that Charlotte is the expert we are adding this task to her Job Description!!!!

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It may be our last blogging day but everything we have learned over this week will definitely last us a lot longer.

For us this week has been a series of firsts –

• First time we’ve ever had a top of the range laptop, with the most up to date software.
• First time synchronising our PC’s files to a laptop allowing remote working.
• First time having an internet connection in a client’s home.
• First time completing paperwork electronically in a clients home and safe in the knowledge that the data is secure.
• First time that images have been stored and organised electronically.
• First time using MSN messenger across the organisation.
• First experience of having an Intranet, using Office Live.
• First time we’ve backed up our data using an external hard drive.
• First time having a professional photographer and IT Consultant in the building.
• First time having to use the word Bandersnatch in a sentence.

We have become quite fond of our laptop and have nicknamed it ‘The Nomad’ as it has not been in one place for more than 24 hours.  The ‘Nomad’ and Vista has taken us on many journeys and new experiences and we are looking forward to many more. Our experiences this week have shown us ways we can improve the service that we provide to the people who come through NOMAD’s door. We have had a taste of how communication on all levels has been improved and we are keen to develop this.

Far from being the end, for us this is just the beginning.   We started this week stepping out of “Life on Mars’ and have emerged in ‘Tomorrow’s World’. It won’t be long before we’re appearing in ‘The Professionals’!!!!!

This week has been enlightening, hard work but great fun. Thank you to everyone involved for giving us this opportunity and a big thank you to Lee Evans from Result IT, he’s been fantastic.