Thankfully we here on the Southcoast of MA have all survived, relatively well, hurricane Sandy. We have had a busy few days trying to work out situations and problems that have occurred for customers with power issues. It seems like we keep saying the same thing over and over, back up, back up, back up. But as much as we repeat this mantra we still see customer problems with not having a current back up. If you do nothing else please formulate a plan for your data to be backed up. Ideally you will have a two tier plan with an external hard drive that you can swap out and an offsite or cloud backup in the event there is a critical physical failure at your location.
So once you have your back up plan what else do you need? Well that depends on your situation. Power, or the lack of it, has been a significant problem during this storm. It is not the actual loss of power that is wreaking havoc with systems but the back and forth of power, no power, power, no power. If your servers are set to reboot each time the power goes down and you don’t have a generator that is going to kick on then set them to a manual reboot. If you do not you could end up with damaging your hard drives. Other pieces of equipment that are in danger of failing during these situations are your workstations (desktops and laptops if plugged into an outlet) as well as any routers or switches. Each of these should be on a surge suppressor and ideally on a battery backup so that you have the time to save the data that you are working on.
The bottom line to remember, all of the issues with hardware and software that seem so critical now is never as important as you or your staff’s health and safety. To all of our friends and customers, stay safe and if you have any question related to your electronics please call us.
