A friend of mine sent me that quote in an email, and I had a really good laugh. Now, I am not advocating anyone do anything crazy like that, but if you sit back and think about that statement for a minute, there certainly is some truth in it.   People don't get serious about DR, backups, or recovery, until something happens. Don't let that be you.

How many times do you think about disaster recovery, but just know the boss isn't going to sign the PO to get a second machine for High Availability, or even signup with a Hot Site for Disaster Recovery? I was at a new prospect a while ago, and I got on their 170 machine to just "poke around", and I noticed that they didn't have any disk protection (i.e. no Raid nor Mirroring). That machine is over 12 years old, how much longer before a disk failure? They are living on borrowed time. I then looked for when the last time they did a full backup, and it was over 4 years ago. So, I asked them "When was the last time you backed up the machine?". They told me "last night". I said to them, "No, you just backed up your data library last night, when was the last time you did a full system backup". They gave me the funny look, like I have no idea. I said, "How about 4 years ago". They said "No way", and went over to the filling cabinet (not a fireproof cabinet, but just a filling cabinet you purchase at Staples to hold files) to pull out the last full save. She read the label on the tape, looked at me and said "How did you know that?". I then ask her, "What would happen to your business if you lost this computer". We scheduled a full system save for that night, and moved it off site to the CEO's house. While that isn't the best location for the tape, being off-site 15 miles away is certainly better than 5 feet away from the machine.

Many shops don't understand the need for taking an occasional full backup, and also moving that backup off-site. They understand when a disaster occurs and they need to recover. The reason the title of this article is so apropos, is that don't let a disaster happen in your shop or across the street to then examine your plan. Can you sleep with your answers to these questions:

• How often do I do a full system backup? Is it at least monthly?
•  Do I have written procedures off-site that describes what is backed up and how to recover?
• Are the tapes off-site?
• Are the tapes labeled?
• Have you thought about backing up to the cloud instead?
• Do I know which tapes and how to recover?
• Have I tested my plan in the last year?
• Do I have a site that I can run a test recovery on?
• Do I have a site I can recover to?
• What happens if my staff isn't available to recover?
• What about the other machines in your network?
• If you have HA software, when was your last roll-swap?
• If I have an HMC can I recover that?
• Is my I_BASE_01 CD/DVD someplace safe and accessible?

Disaster Recovery is a vital function that your company can't afford to just gloss over. It starts with good solid backups. If you don't understand backups, aren't sure if you are doing backups correctly, or wonder if you have everything? Then bring in iTech Solutions for our Backup/Recovery analysis and we will insure your backups are complete. While there are some customers who can't afford a second machine, or others that don't want a cold site (where you restore your backups to). Check out iTech Solutions answer to these problems at www.i-in-the-cloud.com. The easiest thing to do is a full backup at whatever frequency you think you can afford. I would recommend at least monthly, but some customers will do this quarterly. But just remember, you can't recover without a good backup. If you are unsure of what you are backing up, you can be sure you will have no idea what to restore and if you restored everything.

We are working with a few customers right now to either bring in a second machine in for High Availability or host them in our cloud with High Availability, as well as working with a few customers documenting and testing their disaster recovery. These customers have seen the holes in their disaster recovery, and are doing the right steps to insure in a disaster they can recover their machine and the data on it. Would you wait for the building across the street to be on fire before you test your fire extinguishers? Probably not, so why wait to test your DR plans. As IT professionals, I believe that it is our responsibility to make management aware of the need for a proper DR plan, and the risks they are taking by not testing and investing in a good DR plan. If management isn't willing to invest in any plan, make sure you have written evidence that you made suggestions and they decided to not fund them. This is what we call CYA.

I certainly hope you look at your plans right after reading this article, and don't wait until you see the fire trucks coming down the road. If you need some help, send Paul an email so that he can get you out a quote for help.  Perhaps an early response to an SOS - Save our System.