Computer Woes

I've informally named my work computer "phoenix" because of its tendancy to crash and burn and then rise from the ashes. Phoenix crashed 12 times in April (I kept a log), and has already crashed twice this month.

Add in daily software headaches and you can see that I don't get along with the computers at work very well. Yesterday, however, in the words of the 2nd level help desk tech I wound up talking to, I hit the jackpot.

I logged into a conference room machine, which failed to pull my roaming profile from the server. When I logged off later, however, it nevertheless saved my (effectively blank) profile to the server. An hour or so later phoenix crashed, and I did a forced boot. Since the roaming profile on phoenix wasn't sent to the server (it only does that when you log off), when I rebooted it pulled the BLANK profile the conference room machine had stored. All my settings, setup files, encryption, etc. were wiped out. After an hour and a half watching a 1st level tech try everything I'd already tried, I got a 2nd level tech who asked me a few questions, and then told me that the server the roaming profiles are stored on isn't backed up. I spent about four hours yesterday and several today restoring my settings, preferences, loading software, etc., and I'm probably back to about 90% of my prior configuration.

The thing that gets me is that my data is backed up every day by an automatic process which we're required to use, but the profiles aren't backed up at all!