Jul 10, 2003
By Pat McGrew, EDP
Welcome to the HVCO Data Management Pavilion of OutputLinks.com!
For the past group of columns I returned to my roots and ran through the issues behind the use of transform programs. I had intended for the next set to continue that thread, and I do promise to get back to it. However, something has happened that has pushed me in a slightly different direction for the next series. Let me explain.
At about 4AM on the morning of May 29th my house began to burn down. We are sure that the fire started earlier, but by 4AM the fire had reached a trio of classic cars in the garage. The tires on a 1960 Cadillac began to explode, which woke my dog up, with me shortly behind. While we heard the sound we didn't immediately know what it was. When I reached the living room I noticed the glow coming from the laundry room. Yes. We were on fire.
At about that time my Mom looked out her window and saw that my garage door was in full flame. She lives in a small house behind my house and had a bird's eye view. We all got out and no one was hurt. That is the good news. The bad news is that ¾ of my house and 6 cars are completely gone. And then there are the computers.
Like many in our industry, I work from home. For some of you it may be work you bring home, while for others it may be that you actually work from a home office. That has been my world for the past 18 months. I tried to be smart about it. I had UPS backups on all of my computers, and routinely backed up my files to an external hard drive. I even cross-filed documents across my network as an additional precaution. What I hadn't allowed for was the roof caving in on my home office. Or, having it doused with copious amounts of water.
Three and a half hours after it all started, the fire fighters were rolling up their hoses and checking for hot spots in what remained of the roof. They also took the time to extract the computer hardware from the rubble that was piled on top of it to give me a fighting chance of drying it out enough to try to get my data off of it. Sure, I've read all of the stories about what can really be recovered from damaged drives, but I had no idea if MY data was retrievable.
The good news is that a lot of it has been. Because my laptop was in a docking station under a monitor stand, we started with it once it dried. Through the heroic efforts of my long-time business partner, Bill McDaniel, much of the data on my laptop was pulled over to a shiny new HP laptop procured from CompUSA. Unfortunately, a very important document was on my desktop machine, and it was fully exposed to the water and smoke. The backup was on the external hard drive, which was also saturated.
A wonderful restoration professional, Dale Muska of Amigos Restoration, learned that I had a file that I needed and he set out to get at least that file for me from the desktop machine. Through his efforts, which were well beyond the norm, he extracted the file and drove it over to me on Saturday morning so that I could get it on to the new laptop. During the next two weeks he managed to get most of my data from the desktop computer and on to an external hard drive.
So why is this important to you? There are several reasons. And they don't have to do the fire so much as they have to do with how we all tend to treat our home offices with regard to our own data, even if we have laid the plans for a bullet-proof disaster recovery program at work.
I'll share what I've learned and some recommendations over the next few columns. So, let's pick this up next time!
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