It’s happened to my clients – it CAN happen to you!
Your computers and all your paperwork are destroyed in an office fire or other computer disaster. What will you do?

Even if you’re prepared for a computer disaster, you’ll still have to:

• Deal with your insurance inspector and claims adjuster
• Hire a cleanup contractor and salvage what you can
• Arrange to rebuild your old office, if that’s what you want
• Locate, procure, rent and move into a temporary or permanent new office (or your home)
• Buy everything new
  • Office furniture and appliances
  • Telephone equipment
  • Computers and all peripherals, including Internet and network equipment
  • Other minor office and computer equipment

You’ll have to recover all your computer programs, emails and data from your backup software:

• Setup new computers, peripheral equipment, Internet connection and networking
• Use your backup software to recover your programs, operating system and data to your new computers
• And while you’re handling all that, you’ll have to carry on with your current business projects and management

If you’re not prepared for a disaster

You could be driven out of business or forced to start over – without all your records, computers, software, data, etc. A good disaster recovery plan, excellent backup software and backup drives should be part of every business computer installation.

How to prepare:
Insurance
I’m no insurance expert, but I can suggest a couple of things.

You need a policy that will cover not only your office and computer equipment, but the costs of restarting your business, like renting a temporary office, cleaning up your destroyed office, a computer consultant (unless you have the skills yourself) and much else.

Be aware of what software replacement terms your policy carries. Will it pay replacement costs for software products? How about your own past work product, all those documents, databases, spreadsheets, presentations, etc?

You’ll need to work closely with an insurer to make sure everything is actually covered and that you understand your policy thoroughly.

Maybe a good method would be to sit down and write out a scenario of what would actually happen in your unique situation, if a bad disaster occurred. If you don’t give it serious thought now, you’re going to have a hard time covering everything you’ll need when disaster strikes.

I don’t even want to think about running a business without insurance, let alone without good backup software.

Computer security:
Backup software and methods:
The key to easier computer disaster recovery is off-site backups.

Here’s my recommended plan:
Use large USB flash drives or USB external hard drives to make nightly, automatic full “image” type backups of each computer’s hard drives, while you’re out of your office.

Every few days (as many days as you’re willing to loose everything for) swap each backup drive with an alternate backup drive and store the backup drive with the latest backup image off-site.

Never leave both backup drives for each computer in your office at the same time – for any longer than absolutely necessary. In the event of a disaster, you must not lose both backup drives and your computers at the same time.

Do NOT make “file-by-file” backups!
Don’t use backup software such as those which backup to the Internet, or the Windows 7 built-in file-by-file backup tool. You must use an “image backup”, which makes a “snapshot” of your whole hard drive, including your operating system. Only an image backup can restore your old computer (or a new one) to exactly as it was at the time of the backup. Please note that the Windows 7 image backup does not allow you to recover individual files or folders. Acronis “True Image” backup software and Storagecraft’s “Shadow Protect” backup software do.

A file-by-file backup can only restore your work product, not your operating system or your programs. If all you have is a file-by-file backup from which to recover your computer – you’ll first have to re-install Windows (if you even have a Windows CD), get your Internet connection working, do many, many online Windows updates (restarting your computer after each one),  get your email working all over again and re-install all your programs (if you have your original program media and all your software license keys).

Only then will you be able to restore your work files from your file-by-file backup. That can easily be a full day’s work for each computer, versus maybe one hour to restore everything from an image type backup software in one step – with no need for your software license keys or original program media.

Microsoft Windows 7 does offer a built-in image backup. But unlike Acronis True Image or StorageCraft’s Shadow Protect backup programs, it doesn’t let you recover files or folders from inside the saved image. You would have to keep both an image backup AND a file-by-file backup for complete protection.

Do NOT depend on an online backup!
You can do file-by-file backups to servers on the Internet. Besides the fact that these are only file-by-file backups:

A ‘gotcha’
There is one important caveat about the ability of an image backup software to quickly restore your computer to exactly the state it was in when you made the backup. Suppose your destroyed computer was running the 32 bit Windows XP operating system and the new computer you purchased to replace it runs 64 bit Windows 7.

32 bit programs have to be specially handled by a 64 bit version of Windows 7. But the 32 bit programs you restore from a backup made with 32 bit Windows XP won’t have had that special treatment and won’t run. You would need to re-install them under Windows 7. There may also be other issues when restoring from one version of your operating system to another.

Best security and disaster recovery products:

• Acronis True Image Home edition backup program -$49.99. My first choice for the home office/small office, or
• Shadow Protect Desktop image backup program – $89.95. My second choice
• Balarc Advisor free computer inventory program
• Seagate USB external hard drives, from Newegg.com online store
• Storm Case water-tight cases by Hardigg Cases. These expensive cases can often be found used on eBay

Also have:

• An excellent insurance policy and an insurance agent you trust
• A relationship with an expert and capable personal computer consultant

The future of backup

Solid State Drives (SSD) are slowly coming down in price. As they gain in sales numbers, the price will drop faster. With no moving parts these SSDs are much more reliable than today’s complex, delicate, high precision, high RPM hard drives. They are also extremely fast to start Windows and run programs.

Most data disasters are caused by hard drive failures, so I encourage you to switch to a Solid State hard drive as soon as possible. You can use a smaller SSD with only Windows and your programs on it as you “boot drive” and store your large amounts of data on a second standard hard drive, in order to buy a less expensive SSD drive.

Disclaimer

My usual disclaimer that I get a (tiny) sales commission if you purchase Acronis Ture Image Home backup or buy from the Newegg store via links on this blog.

Until next time – I hope you’re prepared…

_jim coe