Aug 21, 2003
By Pat McGrew, EDP
Welcome to the HVCO Data Management Pavilion of OutputLinks.com!
Have you backed up your home office data today? Yesterday? Last week? If you did, where is the archive? On another machine in your home? Did you send media offsite, or maybe put it into a fireproof vault?
I am asking all of these questions because, as I mentioned in previous columns, my house burned down May 29th, and since then I have been struggling with the reconstruction of my home office. Part of the challenge is in dealing with the insurance company and not actually having a real place to call home at the moment. I am working on that as I write, but it isn't my focus for this column. What is my focus is the assumptions we all tend to make about how accessible our data will be even if we have a system problem.
In my case the ?system problem? was the crashing down of the roof of my office area onto my three desks as a fire roared through my house early one morning. For my home office the results were almost incapacitating. I had built my backup plan with the assumption that a machine on my network would crash. I had carefully built a schedule to cross back up my accounting files, project files, and articles, as well as other software components. There was only one problem. The backup was to a machine in the same network configuration in my home office. It was not a remote site. I did not think to build back up disks or CDs that I kept elsewhere.
Today, if you have not come up with a plan, let me offer a few suggestions! The easiest is to buy a fireproof box and back your data up to a ZIP disk or burn a CD or DVD. Store the backups in the fireproof box and that should get you through most catastrophes. Remember, though, that when you backup the data you still need applications. If you do not have the software installation media for your programs, this could present a problem when you go to recover. For me, the problem was not only locating all of the software, but the Code Keys. I use a lot of software that made it a time consuming problem as well. Yes, I could buy a replacement machine to get through the immediate problem, but then I had to get all of my applications on to it. The entire Adobe Suite, from InDesign 2.0 through to Illustrator and Photoshop take time to install. Add to that the accounting software, a variety of photo touch up applications, email formatting programs, security software, virus scanning software, and a variety of document composition tools and viewers. Well, you get the idea. This is a lot of software! Your environment may be as packed as mine is, and you may have data base applications and contact management applications, too.
Locate all of your software installation sets and get them into secure storage as well. Someone suggested to me that a gun safe would work well. If you have one and there is room in it, it could make an excellent spot. I had all of my software in a plastic bin in a closet. I was lucky that the bin protected the disk cases and survived. I now know that it wasn't the best idea.
Another option is to look for online, internet-based backup systems. Remember that to make this work you would need high speed, broadband access. A dial-up modem is not a viable connectivity option. xDrive (www.xdrive.com) offers a free 15 day evaluation for their services, and have plans from $10 to $30 a month. The folks at @backup (www.atbackup.com ) offer a free 30-day trial and charge based on storage starting at $50 a year for 50 MB up to $1000 a year for 2G.
If you go down this path, be sure to check out the company thoroughly. You don't want to be sending your documents off to a server and then have it disappear!
I am still learning more about what I didn't know. I'll be back next time to share a bit more of disaster recovery for the home office! If this is valuable, drop
me a line at pm@outputlinks.com!