I received a call from one of my newer customers that I had done some work for.  I had made some suggestions they might want to consider, better security for the wireless setup, use a back up service, install UPS's on each computer, that sort of thing.  They had delayed any decision, and I figured they had perhaps decided not to implement some of my suggestions.  However, when I got to the phone, there was a different story.

What happened:  It seems that a fire had broken out in one of the retail spaces in the strip center she rented space in.  Two stores down, lint in a Laundromat dryer caught fire, against the far wall in the space between hers and the Laundromat.   This space quickly caught fire, and was burning robustly when the Fire Department arrived.  By the time the fire was out, one wall of her space and caved in, and there was some fire damage near that wall, which melted the computer on the ground beside this wall.  It was a total loss.  The rest of the office sustained water damage, and the remaining computer was also destroyed.  Data from these two hard drives was not retrievable.

The recovery:  Since the computers were useless,  the owner found nearby space and bought new computers.  I the went in and setup the network, configured everything, and turned it back over to the owner, which took about a full day,   A lot of their business related data (mostly manifests and invoices) was on paper stored in 7 file cabinets in that same office, going back to 2000..  All of this information had to be removed, dried in a dehumidifier, and re-input into the computers.  It took two weeks of overtime to do all of this, and a great deal of miscellaneous information was lost.  Their business suffered during the recovery time, and their losses were, as I was told, "significant".

If it happened today: Needless to say, they implemented my backup idea after this happened.  Today, they could actually get back up and running from a laptop and temporary location in just hours, and in full mode in two days or less.  Everything they have gets backed up nightly, and once the two new computers were bought, all I would have to do is make a restore of each computer and they would be back in full operation.

If you own a small business and do not back up your systems, you are a theft, a disgruntled employee, a natural disaster or even a leaking water pipe away from losing your business.  What would you loose if the computer you are reading this page on right now suddenly had a unrecoverable hard drive crash? 

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