If you remember in last months’ article we proposed a scenario where you have just lost everything in a catastrophic hard drive loss.
Imagine all your documents, your photos, videos, contacts, appointments and all those emails, the list is never ending. We rely on our computers to handle so much for us, and hard drives are so large today that we may not even know what all we are missing.
When asked what they miss the most after a natural disaster, the number one response was their family photos. In fact that family album is highest on the list when someone is fleeing from a home fire after the actual people in the home.
If we place such a high value on these images, why is it that we choose not to protect them better? It’s probably because we don't think anything will go wrong. We expect our photos documents etc will be just fine, crashes only happen to the other guy. If this is you WAKE UP! You are obviously dreaming.
We recently had a hard drive stop responding after just 1.5 yrs of service. This was no typical hard drive; it was our main storage drive. We are talking about a 1 TB hard drive. A full terra byte drive people, that’s 1000 gigabytes of information. It stored nearly 2 years of client files Weddings, portraits, commercial ads, documents even our website backup was on this drive. To put this into perspective, it would take 250 DVD's to store all the information on this one
drive.
As I researched through the internet for recovery solutions I found an interesting article on business related data loss. The article quoted that 96 percent of all businesses that suffer a catastrophic data loss never ... NEVER recover from it and subsequently fail as a result of that loss !!! I slapped my head and thought to myself what? How could this be? Right then and there I resolved to be one of the 4 percent that made through.
We honestly had a good leg up on surviving this. We backup everything and I do mean everything. We have 2 copies of our most recent client files; they are stored on separate hard drives. We also have all of our original customer files stored on DVD's. Even if we lost both hard drives, we would still have the original images to work from. This would mean re creating everything but this is a better option than simply loosing it all. Before our company ever went digital we knew that this day may come. We chose to develop a backup plan for our files before a single digital image was taken.
The plan helped us in this situation except for one area. Our most recent files. At any given time we may be working on 1 to 15 customer albums, these albums are laid out digitally and printed by us from those files. At the time of the failure we had 10 client albums in various stages of completion. This represented 100's of hours of work and a financial loss of all that time, plus the added time necessary to recreate all the designs. This became my mission. We needed to recover this work at the very least from our now defunked drive.
As I searched the internet and review horror story after horror story of how these drives can be totally destroyed during the recovery process with minimal or no recovery, my hopes sank.
I thought there must be a better way! I finally found a company based in Colorado that seemed to fit our needs. After calling and speaking to Kira I knew we had found our answer. Data Recovery Link is the name of the company and they we just great to work with. We sent in out drive which turned out to be a raid drive with 2 500 GB drives working in sync. A couple of days after we sent the drive off we were blessed with the news that we could likely get a 100% recovery within a week or so. We opted to send a new 1 TB drive to them for the transfer and within a few days they were done and our new drive was on its way back to us.
You might be asking what the cost of all this was? Well it wasn't cheap but it was worth every penny we paid. The recovery bill was about $1500, shipping x3 (there x2 drives and back x1 drive) was about $175, a new 1 Tb drive was $300; All totaled roughly $2K. However, if you stop and think about the flip side of the coin the costs involved in a total loss of the drive would have been devastating. The hundreds of hours it took to create the albums we had in production not to mention the time invested in making corrections on images etc. Wow it boggles the mind; it also doesn't surprise me that businesses can fail as a result of such a loss.
As a direct result of this incident, we began looking into alternative backup methods for out work. We found a great low cost system that works automatically with your computer and stores your files off site.
We actually became a representative for this company and currently use the system on all our critical systems in the office. The cool part about this system is that it works automatically backs up your computer so long as you are connected to the internet. The program will search for files in the locations you give it or by default and store them off site for you.
When you first install the system, your initial upload of information will take up to several days depending on the number of files you are backing up and your internet connection speed. The only draw back at this point is that the system doesn't back up external or network drives; the company has told us that this is currently in the works. They are also looking forward to business related solutions as well. To download a free trial of the service for your self, visit our website.
What do you do if your hard drive crashes now, simply run your backup and even if you didn't get to back it up, you will likely have an alternative for recovery. While we wouldn't wish this problem on anyone, it's nice to know that you can save yourself and maybe even your business from almost certain disaster by taking just a few simple steps. - Aloha
