Being Prepared for the Worst

Let’s face it, small businesses lives knowing a couple of things.

Disaster striking is not a matter of if, but when. I think this is why a lot of small business go out of business. They go along just fine, until they hit a bump, and they can’t make it over because they haven’t prepared.
The more important something is, the more likely it will be the thing which dies. It will also stop working when you need it the most. Is this Murphy’s law!

For many small businesses, your computer system is one of your most important pieces; you can’t do anything without it. And if you are small enough, that you don’t have an “IT Person” on staff, even part time.

This means it is extra important to have a good system in place before disaster strikes.

I’ve seen this first hand twice recently. On Saturday, while I was working on a client’s project trying to get it ready for the live launch, lighting stuck. How close: try in my yard. With a loud crack and pop, I hear the smoke alarm go off. Why, the “magic smoke” which makes my electronics work escaped. Ok, so it’s not “magic smoke”, but it was fried circuits. In a second I went from working to a blown up modem, fried router, blown network card, and a computer acting a little flaky.

Luckily I had backed up my entire system just a few days earlier. I was also able to purchase replacements (because it happened in the afternoon before the computer stores closed), and be back up and working that evening, only 2 or 3 hours later. However, now I am keeping some additional spare parts, because if it had happened at 8:30 or 9:00PM, I would have been down the rest of the night. So for the $200 it costs to have a back up, it means I’m down for 30 minutes not 3-48 hours, and when time is money, I can’t be waiting.

The second incident happened over the course of a couple of weeks. One of my clients, a wedding photographer, has had a few local computer issues, which we thought were resolved. Unfortunately, a virus left a back door into her system, and now her computer is basically unusable. Luckily for her and her clients, she meticulously backups all of her photos. So later today I will be wiping the system to clean it of the virus for good. Then with the backups we will load the photos back, and her softare back off the original CDs. (She also keeps the original CDs handy, so she doesn’t have to spend a day or two finding them.) She has been down for about a day now, but compared to the cost of losing all of her client’s photos, it’s not so bad.

In either case, had the damage been worse, or backups not been kept, it could have driven us out of business. But for the cost of a few hours of backing up and few cents per Gig of storage on external drives, we can both stay in business and keep working.