How much to chargeback users for file restores?

[albeaker]

Hello. My group currently provides on demand file restores for end-users at my company. We have about 1000 users, but we are getting what we consider excessive restore requests, usually about 20-30 a week. Also, we get alot of "repeat business" as a small segment of the population generates the majority of the requests. Partly to recoup the growing labor costs (help desk, tape monkey) but mostly to dissuade future requests, we plan on charging a fee back to the user's. We have management buy-in, but we are not sure what an appropriate price would be. Certainly we do not want to prevent legitmate requests, but it has to be steep enough that it will stop the abuse. Does anyone have any experience or advice? BTW, we use Veritas Netbackup and are mostly Novell Netware 5.x. Thanks.

 

[Guest_imported]

I think you need to calculate the time the 'tape monkey' does the job plus any administration costs to manage the charge. If it takes say 10 minutes to do a restore, then raise in invoice for 10 minutes of the TMs time + say 5-10 $ administration. Personally I would charge 25 USD per file for a restore.

 

[williambishop]

You have to be careful here not to alienate or tick off the powers that be. You would be suprised that the people who are the most illiterate and stupid prone are also the ones with the closest ties to the top tier. Don't go overboard. Charge a nominal fee at first, and then escalate cost on repeat business(frequent flyers I like to call them).