| By Pat McGrew, EDP
Welcome to the HVCO Data Management Pavilion of OutputLinks.com!
In the last column I mentioned my fire. May 29th I lost 6 cars, a lot of my house and belongings, but no
people or pets. I did lose my home office, however. Many of you work from home offices, even if you are assigned to a large
enterprise HVCO environment, so I want to share some of what I lost and learned so that you can be prepared for a disaster
that doesn't happen in your plant, but happens in your home!
If you have any type of computer at home, even if you do not use it for working, remember that after a fire or flood it
will probably be in sad shape. Even if it appears to be working, the restoration experts tell me that any type of soot or
water near a PC does hurt it, even if it doesn't immediately kill it.
You may be thinking that it doesn't really matter because you back your data up. That was my thought until the fire
happened. That was when I came to understand that backing up my critical data to a 120 gigabyte hard drive that sat on
the same desk and burning CDs on a regular schedule that sat under the same desk did not constitute a disaster recovery
plan. Unless the data is somewhere else, it is not safe. Then, I realized that I was missing some key pieces of my data.
The first thing we did once the firefighters let us back in was to take a look at what had been my home office. The
roof came down on top of the desks, computers, printers, scanner, routers, modems and other bits and pieces of what had
been my home office. The software disks and CDs were stored in a plastic bin in a closet and were unharmed, but they
could have just as easily been a part of the melted debris, along with the code keys, which were carefully stored with
the CDs. The tower case for my primary PC had been sitting on top of my desk behind my monitor and keyboards, while the
laptop was in its port replicator under a monitor stand next to the external hard drive. The printer was sitting on top
of another monitor stand, while all of the keyboards and mice were fully exposed.
The firefighters pulled all of the equipment out and gave me two pieces of advice. First, get the hardware outside
and then turn it so that any water can flow out. Second, get whatever you can off of it fast, because even if it comes
up it won't last long. Why? Tiny soot particles fly through the air along with the water and they are corrosive. They
sit on the hard drive and the rest of the electrical components and they slowly destroy them. |
 |
|
The people at Amigos Restoration gave me the follow-on advice. No matter how good something looks, if it is electrical
tell the insurance company that you are calling it a loss. That is true of anything to do with the computers, TVs, radios,
phones, small appliances or most other things you plug in. That includes UPCs and power strips. They tell me that they
have seen things work for a month or more and then seize. If you have already settled with the insurance company you
have no resource.
We tried booting the desktop computer and we were able to retrieve a few files, but it is still acting like an
unhappy child. It works when it wants to. Yes, I had backed my critical data to my external hard drive, which has
stayed working long enough to extract everything from it, but what I had not been as careful with was my email! My
critical email was on the desktop machine, and I hadn't realized what that meant until I didn't have it.
I am still struggling without my primary contact list, email history, and calendar. I've lost the archive files,
as well, because somehow it never occurred to me to move them to the external drive.
This is still a learning experience, so next time I'll let you know what I find out about using external backup
services! If this is valuable, drop us a line at pm@outputlinks.com! |