| Top Disaster Recovery Tips |
| Written by Jenny Flex | |
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Have you ever dropped your laptop or notebook computer or do you tote your netbook from place to place? If you should pick up a computer virus, who knows what the damage could be to your important files. Maybe your kids accidentally deleted those irreplaceable photos of the once-in-a-lifetime family trip to Europe from two years ago. And as terrible as it is to consider, businesses can be vandalized by a single disgruntled employee. Or perhaps that game you installed to help your child learn their fractions made a few more changes to your system than you expected. Here are some hints that can make your disaster recovery plan an effective form of insurance against computer system or data loss. Plan It and Write It Down!This goes for a home computer or for a business. Take the time to formulate a response plan for computer disaster. Then, once you’ve taken the time to formulate a plan of action, make sure that you’ve written it down. And, that you’ve printed it out—little good to have written it down in a word processor file that is only stored on the computer that just stopped working!After it’s written down, make sure that whoever needs to use it can understand what it says. For a home user, this may mean that the computer-savvy kid next door knows what you back up to. For a business user, this may mean training a couple of people on what to do to implement your disaster recovery plan. And make sure that you review it periodically—it’s sort of like a fire drill for your computer disaster recovery plan. If you can’t use the plan because you don’t understand it, you may as well have no plan at all. Part of writing it down includes making sure that appropriate people have access to any passwords associated with your computer disaster recovery plan. This might include passwords to online backup services, redundant or spare computer systems, backup files, and backup/restore programs. The best plan can be rendered dead in the water if a critical password is needed and no one knows what it is or where to find it. Practice, Practice, PracticeFrom time to time, implement your disaster plan. Use your backup files and try to restore something—make sure that they work. If you rely on having redundant computer systems in your business, pretend that something happened to your first-line system and restore the redundant system and see if you can keep working from it. There are not necessarily any hard and fast rules to how often you should do this, but you should do it a couple of times a year in your business. Perhaps do it during a set time each year such as during national Fire Prevention Week, or during the approach of some holiday or scheduled downtime in your business.Have Redundant CommunicationsIf you are a business, you should have a plan in place to notify your staff that there has been a computer outage by some means other than by email. What would you do if a computer disaster took down your email system? You might consider having a method to send cell phone text messages to key employees and computer system users. This should especially be the case for those who are responsible for implementing your disaster recovery plan.Back It UpThis seems like it should go without saying, but it happens more often than might be expected. You should have a method in place to back up your key systems and data, and it should be done regularly. How regular is that? Regular enough is that you know when your last good data back up was made and that you know how much you would lose and need to re-work. If you back up all your data nightly, then you know that if you lose your computer system at 2pm in the afternoon that all your work from list night’s backup to 2pm might be completely gone and need to be re-worked. Also, confirm that your backup is good. If your backup software has a verify option, be sure to use it. You should be practicing a restore as part of your computer disaster response drills. You’ll sleep better knowing that if your computer system fails that you can get to your key data. |
Disaster Recovery is something that many people and (unfortunately) some businesses don’t think about until it’s too late. Only when disaster has struck and data or computer access has been lost do they think about how they will get back up and running with their computer systems. Far better is to consider how you will recover from a disaster well before the disaster happens. Have you ever thought about the myriad of problems that can happen to your computer system? Despite all the electronics, many parts of a computer are still based on mechanics and these can break down. | < Prev | Next > |
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