Oct 9, 2003
By Pat McGrew, EDP
Welcome to the HVCO Data Management Pavilion of OutputLinks.com!
In my last columns I have been looking at disaster recovery from the personal side. If you work from a home office, or you bring work home and it lives in a home office environment in addition to your business office, you should be thinking hard about your current backup plan and your recovery strategy. No matter how safe you think your environment is, things to happen.
In my case it was a fire that took out all of my electrical wiring, a lot of my roof, all of my garage and laundry room, as well as the kitchen, dining room and part of the living room. What was left was soot laden and uninhabitable. A fire isn't the only thing that can happen. Floods, hurricanes, and tornados inflict their fair share of damage every year, too. Even if your home has never been impacted before, there is always the off chance.
Keeping your family and home safe is clearly your first priority, but, if you do work form home or keep valuable data in your home PC environment, there are a few things to think about. We covered the issues surrounding restoring from old back up disks and files in the last column, so lets turn to some ideas on building a restorable environment. Remember, how far you go down this path is up to you. The goal is to make your decisions about how much to back up, where to back it up, and when to refresh it with your eyes wide open.
Start by taking a look at what you may already have on diskette, CD, streaming tape, Syquest drives, ZIP or JAZ disks. Have you mixed your business and personal files? Have you mixed source files from a variety of applications? The real question is, how have you organized your files in your backup scheme?
If you have mingled the various file types and applications, along with mingling home and business files, you have some decisions to make. You can leave what you have alone and just hope for the best, or you can re-organize the file around the purpose and type of files. The next question is where they will be safest. Let me suggest that your back up should not reside in proximity to your current PC environment. In the best of situations you back up your files and send them somewhere else, like a friends garage or your brother's basement. Or, you may have a safe that has the capacity to handle your media.
You may also want to look into one of the online vaulting services. This could serve for your newly reorganized archive as well as for all of your new back up activities.
I do recognize that many of you do not have a personal backup strategy so you may think that there is nothing to reorganize. However, if you have a drawer of CDs or diskettes with personal data; you do have some type of archive already in progress. The goal is to make it usable in case you have to rely on it.
While we are on the topic, though, do you know where all of installation disks are for the applications running on your PC? Are you certain that you can reinstall them in your current operating system environment? A disaster recovery strategy involves both backing up your current environment, but also planning for restoring that environment in case of a disaster.
Now that I have you thinking about your home office environment, next time we'll turn an eye back toward your office environment with some reminders of the things that go wrong most often when trying to restore corporate data. If this is valuable, drop us a line at
pm@outputlinks.com!