In the wake of the recent catastrophic data failure of JournalSpace, I’m going to talk about disaster preparedness and disaster recovery and how you can prepare yourself, your data and your web site for such an eventuality.

I originally prepared this post back in September, after Houston sustained a direct hit from Hurricane Ike. A large number of tasks I performed to get us ready to ride out the hurricane related to my web design business and our personal data. But don’t wait for a natural disaster (or any other event) to start thinking about backing up your data. That’s something you should be doing regularly anyway, whether you are a business owner or just a hobbyist.

As a web designer, I am responsible for protecting my clients’ data, my work product and business systems. Hurricane Ike gave me a chance to plan a little bit in advance (a few days) and think about how to handle the situation. There would be down time. How would I communicate with my clients, notify them about the impending event, and give them status updates? What steps would I take to protect my computer equipment which contained years of work?

Other events offer no such warning period. Fires, mechanical failures, all happen in the blink of an eye. There is precious little time to save existing data. So you must rely on your backups to get your business back up and running as quickly as possible. In my case, since I had some notice, I was able to immediately prepare full backups of all my computers’ drives and then burned several copies of essential data on DVD for an extra measure of safety. That window of time also gave me opportunity to notify my clients and potential clients that there was a chance I’d be offline (the site was fine, since the web server is not in Texas) for a few days if power outages were widespread. I was also able to leverage the power of Twitter to keep everyone updated on our status and used my cellphone to send essential emails and text messages during the (thankfully brief) power outage.

Backup Solutions

There are several different backup solutions available and your backup plan should not depend on only ONE such solution but should ideally be a combination of things that will ensure that you’ll be able to retrieve working copies of all your data if disaster should strike.

Online/Remote Backup

Online backup is a good choice to recover data after a local disaster such as fire or flood. There are two main players in the online backup game, Mozy and Carbonite. Several links below discuss the pros and cons of each. Another contender in the online backup circle is i-Drive. It has several levels of backup capabilities, each more costly and offering more drive storage so you can tailor it to your needs and/or budget.

• Review of online backup services by Consumer Search
• Mozy
• Carbonite
• i-Drive
• i-Backup Online Backup and Storage

Backup Storage Devices

Drive real estate is in free-fall right now with half terabyte (500GB) drives going for as little as $150. There’s no excuse for not having external hard drives to store data and backups. Consumer Search offers a review of some external hard drives available. The best places to check are TigerDirect, OverStock.com and Buy.com. Below are links to other external storage reviews. Be sure you get a new drive rather than a refurb drive. You are investing in your business data, therefore you are investing in your business. Don’t trust your data to a rusty old pie plate. You can get an external drive enclosure and pick out the hard drive of your choice. I’ve found it’s best to stick to drives such as Western Digital, Toshiba (notable for their small form factor laptop hard drives). Hitachi/IBM I’ve had less good luck with. Several companies make external USB drives (LaCie, Fantom, Western Digital’s MyBook, etc.).

• iOmega
• LaCie Mobile Hard Drives
• Fantom, the Leader in External Hard Drives
• Western Digital MyBook
• Maxtor Backup and Storage Solutions

Have a Backup Plan

All the fancy drives aren’t worth a hill of metal shavings if they aren’t used regularly. Backup your data daily if possible, at least weekly and definitely monthly. Most backup software allows incremental backups so less media are used for redundancy. And make sure to TEST the backup. Don’t wait until you need it to see if it works. The beauty of portable USB drives is that they can be used and then moved offsite to a safe or vault for safekeeping. Or take your office backup home and your home backup to the office. Whatever you do, make sure you make it part of your routine, just like you sit down once a month and pay bills.