I got that c: hard drive failure message last week late on weeknight. Thirty minutes is not enough time to back up all your data. I didn’t panic because I have a recovery plan.
What is a recovery plan? A plan for your business if there is some kind of disaster or loss of critical service for the business. Every business, regardless of size, needs a recovery plan.
My first thought when I got hard drive failure message was do I have everything I need to service my clients tomorrow? I had all my appointments and contact information synchronized to my smartphone and accessible from any computer via the web so I knew without my main computer working what was coming up the next day.
Can you access all your emails, appointments and contact information easily without your main computer? What about if your whole office is unavailable to you? This is an essential component to your business recovery plan.
Because my business is totally reliant on computers, I have two spare computers that are always ready to act as emergency backups. When you create your recovery plan, ask yourself if you can function without a computer and for how long.
Just twenty minutes before I got the c: drive failure message I received the email from my automated off site backup that backup had completed successfully. All my critical business information is backed up automatically and nightly to a server. All my files are backed up daily to an external drive that sits next to my computer. Why two backups? Off site storage space is cheaper than it used to be but I have a very large music collection, some large technical files and a large picture collection that would cost too much to save in the cloud so I only cloud backup my essential business files.
What kind of backup system do you have for your business? Can you access from the cloud? Do you store it on an external drive? Backup systems are another essential part of your recovery plan.
Next steps? Keep watching my blog page for part two.
