How to Avoid or Recover from a Computer Disaster

Any kind of disaster is a debilitating blow to a business, whether it has five employees or 50,000. The new wrinkle in disaster prevention is that a business's digital capital now sits on some hard drive in an office, and the loss of that data can rank as one of the worst misfortunes that you can suffer.

If there was a fire in your business and you had assurances that everyone reached safety, what would be the one item you would grab before saving yourself?

People in the computer industry would probably say: the backup tape that records all your business dealings and transactions. That is because those records are truly unique to your business, whereas you can always manufacture or reorder HVACR products or continue to provide service. But can you reconstruct, completely and correctly, all your records and do so within an acceptable time frame? The inability to convey information to and about your customers can be the equivalent of a business suffering from amnesia.

Among experts, planning for a disaster is the first step. While that observation might smack of a cliché, it is true.

Here are some tested and proven techniques that will either help prevent a computer disaster from occurring or mitigate the impact of any calamity. Planning now for the worst could very well save your business later.

• Conduct an audit

  This is probably the single most overlooked step in protecting your company data. While we always hear about audits in every phase of business, most of us ignore it even though our intellect tells us it makes sense. Don't presume that you know what kind of protection you have until a professional in-house or a consultant actually puts your operation through the paces. How do you know what you don't know? The only way you can know is to conduct an audit or run a drill for worst-case scenarios. You might be surprised, even shocked, at the results of a thorough audit. Done in-house, it'll keep your staff on their toes, and if you go for outside advice, these audits are often free or very low cost. Every medical doctor, when assessing someone's health, wants to have a baseline on a new patient. Why would you be less careful with your business's digital capital?

• Back up securely

  This is the single most important step you can take to ensure that you don't lose information. But there are several ways to do this. Most businesses, in the past, backed up on two tapes (used on alternate days) that someone would take home. With two tapes, if you needed to restore the information, you had the protection that if even one of the tapes didn't work, you only lost one day of data. Depending on the size of your company and backup needs, you can now literally create a photo of the hard drive you need to back up so it completely copies the hard drive. That way you don't find out later that you had not backed up sections of the hard drive that contained valuable information. Norton's Ghost offers this “photograph” of your hard drive and the cost is quite reasonable.