Sep 15, 2003
Welcome to the HVCO Data Management Pavilion of OutputLinks.com!
By Pat McGrew, EDP
If you've been following my columns for the past three months you know that in the last week of May my house burned. No people or pets were harmed, but I lost a lot of equipment and half a dozen cars. Was I insured? Sure. Has it all been resolved? No. It turns out that not all insurance companies honor their pledge to stand by you and work as quickly as possible to help you get back on your way.
However, while all that has been perking in the background, I have had to continue to be productive. The start of that effort began with identifying the real condition of the equipment that had occupied my home office. Two laptops, a couple of towers, scanners, fax machines, data switches, routers, wireless networking devices, external hard drives, digitizing tablets, and printers were only part of the package. They formed my infrastructure, though, and as daylight arrived and I began to assess the damage, I also began to figure out how to get back online and working.
Starting the adventure involved getting the PCs dried out and then trying to get what I could off of the hard drives. The best advice of the fire fighters was to work fast. Get them dry and get everything off I could because ultimately the soot would destroy the hard drives. The other thing I had to do was to find what remained of the back up ZIP disks and CDs, which were in plastic bins in a pantry closet. They survived!
The other thing that survived were the CDs to all of the software installed on my PCs, and the installation codes. Again, these were in plastic bins in a closet and so were missed by the fire, water and soot that blanketed the house. That meant I could get back to some level of productivity as soon as I could grab a PC to work on. That involved a quick trip to the local Computer retailer and the acquisition of the fastest laptop they had in stock.
I'm outlining this again because it sets up the next series of columns. I learned a great deal about disaster recovery on the SOHO side of things, but I also learned a lot more about the issues in trying to work with backed up data. As I talked to colleagues and professionals in disaster recovery I began to recognize that there is more to recovery than just getting the data back.
Over the next series of columns we will look at some of the issues you face if you need to restore your personal office from back up files, and also the issues you need to be prepared to handle if you are faced with restoring your corporate environment from your backup files. There is more to it than pushing a disk into a disk drive or mounting a tape. Hang on, we'll go for the ride together. If this is valuable, drop us a line at pm@outputlinks.com!