A Small Business nightmare, what would you do?

Posted by Church1182@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 67 comments

So the other day I was chatting with an aquaintance and they were lamenting a scenario that had me asking the question, what would I do if that were me? The general scenario is a small business changes ownership and the new owner hires you for a role in the business. You notice some issues with the network and they ask you to look into it. That's when you discover they are running everything on one machine with effectively no management and it's all 10 years out of date, the hardware, software, all of it. Domain Controller, file shares, the software that runs the business is running on this machine, and there is a 3 month old backup on and external drive that someone made with no documentation. That's it. Where do you start in a situation like this? My initial thought was to get a fresh backup of everything immediately, but then what?