Chapter 5: Drafting Your Disaster Recovery Plan

Overview

One of the many amazing things about the response to the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001 is how quickly some of the businesses in and around the disaster areas got back to work in spite of the devastation.

Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial firm that lost most of its New York-based employees in the World Trade Center that day, reopened its operations at another location just one full day after the attack.

When interviewed later on, many of these business people cited two major factors in their ability to do this so effectively:

• They had a disaster recovery plan.

• They practiced what to do beforehand.

Hopefully, you’ll live your entire life without experiencing anything of this magnitude at your home or business, but that day of catastrophes taught us all a lesson in preparedness.

Interestingly enough, however, while companies of all sizes usually have detailed manuals about how to protect their computer systems when the great earthquake or great power grid disaster or great asteroid strikes, they usually do not have contingency plans for the most common disaster of all: when a human does something to his or her PC that causes it to fail and lose its proprietary (on that PC only) data.

Read on, develop your personal disaster recovery plan, get started with protecting your data, and you’ll have a step up on major conglomerates with billions of dollars in assets and manpower.