What to do if Your Computer Crashes

It’s 2 p.m. You’re in the middle of typing an e-mail to a client. You’re about to hit send when it happens. Your screen turns blue! You reboot. Nothing. You reboot again. Still nothing. You’ve lost not only what you were working on, but all of your data.

This scenario, or some variation of it, may not have happened to you yet, but it will. The desktop you work on each day, the server that stores your company’s data and the laptop you carry with you on road trips — all of them are guaranteed to fail at some point.

And without preparation, that failure can mean the end of your business. According to a survey by the National Archives and Records Administration, 90% of businesses that lose critical data will close their doors within two years of the incident.

As technological innovations continue to revolutionize the way we do business, we become increasingly reliant on technology to manage all aspects of business, from simple word processing tasks to creating award-winning multimedia presentations to invoicing clients. With that reliance comes a greater vulnerability to the forces that threaten your data, such as software and hardware fallibilities, viruses, employee errors, sabotage and natural disasters.

Think Like a Boy Scout: Be Prepared.
An effective data backup plan is like information insurance for your business. The following steps will help you to ensure that your data is always there when you need it.

1. Make sure your data is being backed up nightly. It’s best to back up to an off-site facility, but if you are using tapes or other portable media, be sure you are taking the media offsite every night and storing it in a secure manner.

2. Plug desktops and servers into surge protectors and attach your servers to an uninterruptible power supply to avoid crashes due to electrical failure. Consider investing in a backup generator, and make sure to have adequate fire alarms and extinguishers on hand.
3. You have plenty to worry about, but don’t just assume that the person you have designated to handle the backups is making sure they are being done correctly. Follow up with them often to make sure they are taking good care of the backups each night.
4. If backing up in-house is too much of a headache for you, one option is to switch to an online data backup provider. These providers offer an automated data backup and recovery service via the Internet that is secure and available anywhere Internet access is available.
5. Draw up a disaster recovery plan that includes backing up all of your business-critical data and make sure to also identify key vendors that can help you through it. Execute that plan to make sure that it works and do a test-restore of your data periodically. One of the key mistakes business owners make is to assume that just because their data is backed up, their restores will work perfectly.

Don’t Panic!
You didn’t get a chance to put your data backup plan into action yet, and you’ve experienced a computer failure. This doesn’t necessarily mean your data is lost.

1. You can send your hard drive out to a service that can try and recover the data from your defective computer. Be prepared, because this might cost you thousands of dollars.

2. Call a professional. Ask someone you trust to refer you to an IT person who specializes in data recovery.

The reality is that the computers in your office can and will fail. It’s just a matter of when it will happen. If you follow the above-mentioned steps, you will be prepared when it does.