Twilight Highlight: Wake up and Smell the Data

Ever have data loss nightmares? I really think you ought to. Seriously. It could be great for your company, and would likely save you money. Nothing like a midnight panic attack to motivate a security upgrade!

Here’s the scene:  A nameless employee calls your direct line while you’re on vacation and reports that the file server is “on the fritz”. They are worried about data loss. Should they bring the storage drive over to the tech people while it’s “still alive”? Beads of sweat start to form on your neck, and it’s not from the beachy sunshine you had hoped to bask in, worry-free.

This has actually happened, not just during REM sleep but in the real business world. The idea was that we would move the client’s data to a stable location and back it up before the system tanked entirely.

The questions we needed to ask ranged from the obvious – “Where is your backup?” …To the frustrating: “What about the backup solutions I have been urging you to use for the past 5 years?”

I told the client to bring in the drive immediately.

A week passed.

Then a call came in to my home phone from my business partner. He needed me to get hold of the client right away. It was 8:00PM and their drive had “died completely”.

I phoned the client and got the lowdown: When I had told them to bring it in a week before, it had “magically started working again”. They had moved some of the most pressing files to another machine on the network and just figured that “it’s not going to die”. Trying to avoid any and all costs (as we are all guilty of), they had not yet woken up to reality.

When the machine actually did die (GOOD MORNING, SUNSHINE!), the person on-site panicked and, for whatever reason, ran the computer to the nearest office supply store, (specializing in staples),  where a tech “played with it for a couple of hours” and came to following diagnosis: “The hard drive is dead. We can send it to a lab for you. $500 to look at it, possibly $50K to recover.”

I got the drive into our office. Five hours later we had recovered all of the data for considerably less. Quite considerably less. Like, I-must-be-dreaming-less.

For tens of dollars a month, nearly any small business can have cloud-synced, real-time accessible network storage and backup.

Or you can fly back from your weekend oasis and pay $50,000 for a kinda-sorta fix.

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