Human error is, by far, the most common and most frequent cause of bus

Human error is, by far, the most common and most frequent cause of business disasters. By definition, human errors are unintentional, and because they occur randomly, we hope that the overall impact on your business operations will be negligible. Each of us has had the experience of developing a new document by revising an older document or by using a template. When we finish our work, we hit the “save” button and immediately realize that we have just written over with new text an old document that we will need again in the future. The same is true when we reorganize our files to reduce the clutter we made in the last month and unintentionally delete a whole folder of important documents.

Unfortunately, there is no single simple solution. We have to expect that human errors will be made, and we must be able to protect our businesses from ourselves to the extent possible. I often notice that managers hope that their employees will be careful with important files, and when they inadvertently delete a file, they hope a backup file exists. I usually suggest keeping track of these events. If you do so, you will begin to realize that these errors occur with greater frequency than you thought. A CD burner is enthusiastically used for backing up data and then forgotten after a few weeks have passed. And the corrective action taken is most often less than satisfactory. In fact, we frequently have observed that the loss of a file is either not even realized or simply never reported, until someone runs nervously through the company asking if anyone still has a copy of a particular file. By that time, it is usually much too late to recover this file from backup systems and it would require more time to retrieve the deleted file than to create a new one. IT managers often have business people making requests of them such as “Could you see if we still have a backup file of the presentation we gave to our most important client last year? I don’t remember the name of the document, but I wrote it in the first quarter of the year.” This is not an efficient use of anyone’s time, and as a small business owner or manager, you know that experienced IT professionals are too expensive to be used in this manner and you have too many other important tasks for them.

Small businesses need a solution that is a combination of user training and a backup mechanism from which users themselves can recover unintentionally deleted files. It helps both the users and the IT staff because the users no longer have to request the IT staff to recover files for them, which can be needlessly time-consuming. And as a small business owner, you do not need to hire someone to operate the backup system in the event your staff needs to retrieve files.

1- The primary purpose of this passage is to

(A) inform small business owners of the consequences of human error, the most common and frequent of business disasters
(B) advocate that small business owners work toward a system of backing up data that allows employees to recover their own files in the case of human error
(C) explain the futility of attempting to recover data or documents that were deleted more than a few hours ago
(D) recommend that small business owners hire more IT staff so that employees don’t have to try to retrieve their own documents in case of human error
(E) advise small business owners to train employees to never delete files, reorganize files, or save any file and thereby prevent the possibility of data loss through human error.

2- In the second paragraph, what do the authors argue is a waste of an IT manager’s time?

(A) purchasing and installing a CD-burner to back up data when the equipment is soon forgotten
(B) training staff to use backup procedures more efficiently to prevent the loss of documents or data
(C) implementing a backup system that allows users to quickly access backups of their own data
(D) keeping track of human errors where data is lost or backup files are used
(E) trying to recover a lost document from a vague description months after it was lost

3- Why do the authors suggest that managers keep track of events that result in data loss or data recovery?

(A) to track which employees are most likely to make errors and use that information in their evaluations
(B) so that the manager can determine how many IT staff members are needed to deal with data recovery
(C) to prove that human errors resulting in data loss occur very infrequently
(D) so that the manager can see that these events occur much more frequently than anticipated
(E) because this information is very important to IT professionals seeking to establish data backup procedures

4- In the final paragraph, which of the following is NOT an advantage listed by the authors in their discussion of the preferred backup system?

(A) Users themselves can uncover accidentally deleted files.
(B) The backup system saves IT workers’ time.
(C) The backup system prevents human error.
(D) Small business owners don’t need to hire someone to run the backup system.
(E) The backup system saves users’ time.