Disaster Planning

I recently handled a routine data recovery job for a client. Well, routine for me but definitely not routine for the client. The drive was in a failed PC serving three users, a family. Photos, original art and music, school documents, college applications – all were at risk. The client was worried.

This job went well and all the important data was fully recovered. Happy endings aren’t always the case, so I figured it was time to remind you about the virtues of disaster planning.

Businesses have known for a long time that creating and following a plan for data recovery is a worthwhile task. In some ways it’s not unlike riding motorcycles in traffic. Experienced riders run a constant stream of what-if scenarios and work out how to react in each case. Failure to do this is no big deal. That is, until something goes wrong and you come up short on options.

Computers in the home digitally store everything from bank records to taxes to family photos and it has become essential that ordinary folks consider the risk of loss. Share your computer with your family and in many cases that drive becomes a single point of failure. Face it: the hardware is dirt. You can buy another disk drive bigger than the last for almost nothing. But what dollar figure do you assign to your data?

Here is where I could go into a list of backup solutions. USB flash drives, a RAID array inside your computer, an external drive, NAS for your network, data copied to DVD and stored in your office or a safe deposit box – all these and lots more can be viable options depending on your particular situation.

But this isn’t a tutorial. It’s a reminder that you need to take the time to assess your digital storage. Think about what you’ll do if this bit or that bit fails. Then, put a plan in place to minimize your risk. Go do that.

I’d be doing myself a disservice if I didn’t mention that my company can help with these steps. We do recovery, too, but prevention is definitely more fun and less stress.

As for me, well, like everyone else I get lazy, too. Sometimes I’ll skip the database checks, or the log checks, or reading the storage reports, or well, you get the idea. Helping this client prompted me to look more carefully at the server I was using to do the work – one of those skipped routine checks – and I found that the boot drive was showing some early signs of impending failure. So, over the next days I’ll pull a spare from the shelf, install an operating system and VMware and swap out the defect.

And onto my to-do list goes a re-assessment of my personal and business backup needs.

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