Client testimonials

David has a 10+ year relationship with a client ever since moving from Chicago to Michigan. They established a program that recognizes employee excellence, called "Excellence is our habit."

They had a really big problem and asked if David could help them out. This is the actual nomination email which won the award that quarter, with the names changed to protect the innocent:

David is not a formal member of the MW team, but he takes care of us like he is. When [Client] had an outsourcing meltdown, MW had to jump into the breach. [Employee1] and [Employee2] both stepped up beautifully, but we encountered a potential disaster. [Client] requested that we prepare confirmation statements for each employee (because they didn’t trust the [Vendor] data). [Vendor] (the outsource vendor) sent a data dump that would form the basis of the work, but when we opened the excel file we found four tabs with thousands of lines of data that were not in a format we could work with it. [Employee1] spent 3 hours manually re-formatting ten lines of data (of the thousands) and we realized that we were in trouble. A chat with [Employee3] led to David who stepped up to put in a dozen straight hours (until 2am) and delivered a clean data dump within a day – problem solved. Without David’s help, we would have failed on the project. And, because he jumped it so hard and with a quality outcome we were able to move through on the original timetable with no interruptions to [Client].

Calculated out, the work would have taken 300 more hours had they continued with the manual process.

Mike

-----
A message from a bigger client:

From: MiaS
Sent: Tuesday, January 27, 2004 6:49 AM
Subject: Re: Drive-by issue

Thanks, David,

...I was thinking of you the other day when I heard on the radio that the Mars rover Spirit was having problems - symptoms = power up, load the program, shut down, over and over. I thought to myself, "I bet David could fix that if they let him take a look at the system for a few minutes..."

MiaS

-----
Some folks I've helped out of tough spots with various technical articles I've written:

From: BillP
Sent: Sunday, November 15, 2009 5:44 PM
Subject: Thanks for the solutions

David,

I'm not sure when you posted the solution, but wanted you to know that after spending hours searching the WEB, re registering dll's and other useless steps I stumbled onto your change the Volume ID solution. I must admit I had serious reservations so I cloned my Server 2003 Hard drive again (Server Backup Software is just way to expensive for a small system like mine), and then renamed the volume ID per your instructions and viola, the Shadow Copies tab on hard drive property showed disable instead of error. Fired up ntbackup, and it backed up successfully (I don't think that has worked for year.)

No VSS or "you haven't backed up your system state in 30 days " error messages and all is well.

Thanks so much for sharing your solution.

Bill

From: PeterV
Sent: Thursday, April 30, 2009 7:01 PM
Subject: Volume Shadow Copy Broken

Hello David,

Quick KUDOS and THANK YOU for the above article.

Your work and effort in this matter really saved my bacon.

Friend of mine had done exactly what you describe: Acronis onto larger disk (in RAID 1 for that matter) and SBS backup crapped out.
In my 'infinate wisdom' I promised to help him (how hard can it be to get Ntbackup in line again?)
Big mistake on my part.
Never suspected VSS would have long-term memory and reminis about the good old disk signature that had meanwhile gone.
Your article was right on the nose.
(Me: relieved, my friend: happy, his real-life business now has SBS support again!)

Thanks again and best regards,

Peter