This article prompted me to publish a document I am working on – my personal IT Backup plans.

We have experienced a variety of very different disasters lately: the financial crises (who would have thought banks would fail?, extended power failures, backups and pc’s dying at the same time…) – the list goes on

This is version 1.  No doubt there will be more later and an explanation of the aspects.

Draft backup plan

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Good Cloud?

googling for backups reveals either

• failed ventures,
• not entirely satisfactory solutions for my non techy users at the school involving greasemonkey scripts.  Not that there is any thing wrong with it, but we need something more robust, regular, reliable.
• requires command line knowledge.  Hmm remember those non techy users?

Or is there?

Does google gears constitute an adequate backup?

Gears allows you to operate offline. I tested it, it works.  I could access and update.  I erxited the browers and came back in and as long as I went to the google docs url, it was OKAY, as though I was still online.

I then logged to the one of the other Pc’s, installed gears, went off line – it worked too.  So now I have 2 copies in theory?

And of course, the PC’s are being backed up – to the external hard drive and idrive, which means that the data stores are being backed up…. so now I have how many copies?

Bad Cloud?

So do we have good cloud or bad cloud now?

So if I lose my PC and local backups (house burns down), I revert to the Good Cloud.

If we have Bad Cloud, eg: google fails, how long could I use the browser version offline?

….

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Flood

In my second job, one of our clients got flooded: the computer room was below sealevel (?) and there was a canal not far way – maybe it rained a lot, maybe the canal broke it’s banks.. I don’t know but what I remember is: When the waters were rising and people left, they put their printouts and spare disks and other pseudo precious stuff that they weren’t carrying on top of the filing cabinets.

One programmer was well protected, he had a backup on the front seat of his car, a backup on the filing cabinet and a backup on his desk at home:

• multiple copies
• offsite

And then..

• The waters rose above the filing cabinets and it was very muddy…
• The car park was higher but not high enough
• The dog’s tail knocked a coffee cup over

It’s the impact you need to worry about, not the likelihood.

• Google could fail
• online photo storage has failed
• Climate change is caused by us and will have major impact – what are you doing?
• Banks failing
• 1000′s of % inflation in Zimbabwe – your money worthless.  Similar stuff  could happen elsewhere for different reasons.
• 1 in 8 have cancer – it can happen to you.

These days anything is possible.

These have all happened within the last couple of months either to us or our friends:

PC and backup both fail

For a horrible few days I though I had lost my Pc and my backupdrive.  Yes I had a third backup but I had got slack… it was out of date.  Managed to recover the PC – thank goodness – I found out how expensive thoise hard drive recovery people are – your data has to be really serious.

Extended power failure – all your stuff is electronic

• and your phone is old and does not have many contacts in it

Your laptop gets stolen

• along with the expensive application’s dongle
• within months of purchasing it and you are so busy with your new business

Your laptop gets unpredictable

• not so bad you replace it, bad enough that you spend days waiting for Dell engineers to replace this, that and the other
• you have not integrated with the cloud, so you are having problems getting at emails, contacts etc

back a bit more….

Your facebook account gets trashed

• I don’t remember the details but somehow this theatrical arty friend pretty much was running her electronic life through facebook

Your website gets hacked

• I helped a friend clean up their web, and in researching it I discovered many sites who did not even know that they had been hacked.

You accidentally deleted (?) your outlook contacts

• you have no backups at all!!

You only had a webmail account, which got deleted…

• You leave the employment of a small company who finally get around to cleaning up your email account…..Luckily all were on good terms and there was a backup.

The power station has not figured out how the big glowy thing works

• The province continues to have rolling unpredictable blackouts…
• my smart cookie of a sister whose livelihood depends on her pc had already got herself with her own UPS and yoga breathing to deal with the scheduled blackouts happening at unscheduled times.

We all live with the possibility of disaster of one kind or another.  We insure our houses, our cars, our bodies.  We lock our doors (most of us anyway, some of us drop our car keys in the front yard … the car gets stolen and the insurance company investigates for fraud!).

We need to insure our electronic lives too – our memories, our financial records, our network….

We have fire drills, so…

• Do you now how to restore from your backups?
• Are the backups actually backing up everything you think it is?
• Is your data safe? as in encrypted, password protected …..
• do you have offsite/ remote access
• ,…

At the very least make a page of what is important to you and what you would do if it is lost, damaged or stolen.

See next posts for an example backup plan

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