Disaster

My office is in Hudson, Quebec, Canada, near Montreal. Starting Monday, Jan. 5, southwestern Quebec, eastern Ontario and northern New England were hit by a storm which dumped ice pellets and freezing rain on the area. Some communities lost power early on Jan. 6. By the end of the storm Thursday, Jan. 8, most of the Hydro-Quebec power grid serving around five million customers, including downtown Montreal, was blacked out.

Overhead wires and tree branches were brought down by an accumulation of several inches of ice. In terms of damage, it is the biggest natural disaster in Canadian history. As of today, Wednesday, Jan. 14, power has been re-established to about two-thirds of the area. For more information on the storm, try my Hudson site here. We'll shortly have more information and pictures. I'm writing this at a temporary facility because my own office is still without power. This seems like a perfect time to review the effects of disasters on businesses.

For a background on disaster planning, try Phoenix International's site. Great stuff to make you aware of potential disasters that you've never even thought of. There are lots of links for other disaster sites as well.

But for the small business, disaster planning often starts with one main thing — backing up your data. Sure you run your tape back-up once a week etc. etc. but let me ask some questions:

• if you are left with only the back-up tape, will you be able to get a tape unit on which to restore it?
• if you back up your whole hard drive on tape, do you have or can you get a new computer similar enough to your old destroyed one so that, when you restore the drive to the new computer, everything will work?
• have you ever tried to restore data from your tape as a test?
• can you restore only some files from the tape?

Unfortunately, many small businesses who rely on tape back-up will have answered no to most of the above.

A couple of years ago there was no easy answer to the problem but the coming of cheap, removable storage has changed the situation. Today, you can put the important files as they are on a Zip, Jaz or similar drive. The files will be accessible just like they are on a hard drive and from any computer. Try Iomega for more information. The nice thing about the Zip drive, in particular, is that it costs around $150 U.S. with a 100-megabyte disk around $15 U.S. It will install under DOS, Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 and lots of people have them.

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