Well, it happened again, I had a major PC systems failure (Windows). My valuable business data (all of it)  was corrupt, my PC could not boot – I couldn’t even download my email! But was I worried? No! Which is probably an unexpected answer when all your client records are destroyed, right?

Well, there’s a hook to this story, some time ago I touched on the subject of disaster recovery with an earlier post about saving your data when disaster strikes. In that post we explored the issue of software and hardware solutions. In my case I invested in an affordable network storage unit. It’s a proactive solution because all my data is regularly duplicated (automatically – I don’t have to do anything) to the network accessible storage unit. After reinstalling a robust operating system (this was my last remaining Windows based PC, now every PC is Linux – Including this one), all I had to do was copy the data back off the storage unit. It even had all my email, email settings, folders, calender, etc. (I was using Thunderbird as the email client as I found I could do much more with it than with other email clients – But that’s simply my opinion).

The point of my post? Don’t negate the probability of a disaster, prepare for it now, to avoid pain later. In my case I was fortunate in that I’m a heavy user of social media to support my business, that and the contributers for some of my other blogs was an issue that kept further stress at bay. Additionally, all blogs (your’s included) should also have an automated backup system. In the case of blogging, your (self hosted) wordpress based blog can make good use of  the WP-DBManager plugin. It (as described by the developer):

“…Manages your Wordpress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database…”

In my case, the automatic backup feature is in use, in fact all databases of all my blogs are regularly emailed to a central (external) email account. Therefore, if the server itself goes down and the backups (on another server) also happen to go down as well, the database backups are still available. An additional note is that the backup unit I installed for my PC’s will also access the Internet (automatically) and download backup copies of my web sites. (Not bad for a little box!)

Don’t get me wrong, being without my main computer for a few days (because the operating system and applications needed to be installed) was inconvenient, I felt secure and stress free as the valuable data of my business and client blogs and/or web sites was safeguarded.

Again, not to belabour the issue, but to those reading this post (and to clients reading this post), please do seriously consider obtaining an automated, network attached data storage unit. When disaster decides to pay you a visit, you’ll be glad to took the proactive approach!

Have you had a disaster? What were some of the issues you faced? What types of solutions have you used (or are considering). Comment below and share in the discussion.