Powered by Smartsupp

Disasters!!

Even with the latest and greatest technology available, computer related disasters still occur.  Normally these happen at the wrong time, just when you are at your busiest or trying to get work out the door.  I’ve no idea why they happen at these times, they just do…

You are probably sitting there thinking to yourself  “Sure I’m fine, I do a backup every so often”.  That may well be the case, but when was the last time you checked those backups?  Also, if your server goes down, what are you going to restore the backups too?  Perhaps you need to sit down and think about Disaster Recovery and have a plan in place just in case the need arises.  You need to workout what your critical daily routines are and what computers, software and services you need to do business.  Once you have that, you need to establish how you can continue to work should a disaster occur.  Many people don’t think it a worthwhile exercise, but if it is the difference between you continuing in business and keeping customers happy, or losing customers to competitors because you cannot trade, I know what I would do.

Home users need to think along these paths too.  If your PC dies and all the pictures of your family over the years were stored on it, what will you do?  Sometimes you can be lucky and you can recover the pictures and other data off the drive, other times, well…. you can lose everything.  Again, some home users are probably thinking that they are fine because they back everything up to a USB drive.  That’s great, but what if Mr. Burglar pays a visit??  He is likely to take the drive and the computer, then what will you do?

We have mentioned Dropbox before on these pages.  Dropbox will syncronise a folder on your PC to secure storage on the internet.  The basic 2GB option is free, so if you do not have an account already, I suggest you pop over to www.dropbox.com and create one.  Don’t forget to use a strong password also.

There are also many online Web sites that will host your images for you, such as Picasa from Google and Flickr.  I would suggest that if you are going to use such a service, you also keep a copy just in case something goes wrong on the website.

If you would like to talk to us on any of the points raised above, feel free to contact us by phone or email.