My weekly contribution to this blog was conspicuously absent over the past month. Where did the identity theft and privacy guy go?
We have a small office network. For a variety of reasons, we decided to upgrade our desktop computer hardware to current technology. We estimated about a week of lost work time for the upgrade process. In preparation, we backed up our entire current document files to a remote server (a process we strongly suggest to all of our clients). We also made a backup to a local hard drive. Then disaster hit. Our local backup hard drive crashed, and later we discovered our local system disk drive also failed. We moved forward upgrading the motherboard and processor as planned.
Fortunately we were able to get back into business rather quickly because we had backed up all of our data to an external server.
So why has it taken a month to get back on the blog? There are a lot of other system settings and files we did not back up because the hard drives crashed before we were able to do so. It has taken weeks to recover and to manually create new files, and the recovery process is likely to go on for months. For example, the many custom MS Word templates we developed over the summer months were lost. We lost all of our email records between May and November, which represents a huge repository of record keeping and reference material for us.
The lost work time was a killer! About three weeks worth. My time needed to be devoted to troubleshooting, repair, and bringing the system back up, which included loading about 25 key applications and configuring them including a new email tool, and more. We needed to catch up on the three weeks of work that built up, and we needed to address all current work.
So what am I blogging about? You!
Home and Small office systems can be vulnerable to huge losses in terms of time and money. Large and medium size enterprises have a full time IT guru who carefully plans for disasters and who provide the time and know-how to recover. In a large enterprise, a disaster on a local desktop can be addressed quickly with little significant lost work time to the worker. A small organization or home user lacks the infrastructure and personnel to affect a quick recovery.
We learned a couple of lessons in our small business office environment about backups and disaster recovery. We now make multiple backups of everything - and not just documents, but email, templates, address books, and system settings so we are able to recover quickly from a minor disaster. But recovery still takes time, lots of it, so you need to take appropriate steps now so when disaster strikes, the effects will be minimal.
What is your business continuity and disaster recovery plan?
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