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Disaster Recovery- Essential Tips for Survival |
The first thing you should do is set an agreed-upon meeting place for your entire dear ones in the event of a disaster. Remember that communication lines and highways might be out of order, so it's best to agree in advance on a meeting place to which all survivors should head. This could be a nearby hill, a square, or the largest and safest of your relatives' houses. This way, precious time spent on searches after missing relatives may be saved. |
Prepare an emergency kit. Such a bag should contain vital medicines for family members whose depend on medication, water-purification pills, and antiseptics. Also include a flashlight, a small battery-operated radio, bottled water, batteries and some cash. Water-proof photocopies of essential documents and a list of contact details (addresses, telephone numbers, and e-mail IDs) of rescue services should also be stored in the emergency kit. Check this kit every six months or so, replacing expired products and medicines. Remember also to update the list of contact details. Don't be tempted to cram the kit with too much stuff, because you might not be able to carry it with you. |
Essential Tips for IT Survival |
As an IT person, your primary concern — after basic survival — is to get back to business as fast as possible, and with minimal damage to your projects or customers. |
Generally speaking, the latest technologies introduced to our lives are also the first to collapse in a disaster. Take mobile phones and the Internet. It takes a minor terror or does attack to bring them to a halt. By contrast, wired communication, electricity, and water supply are slightly less susceptible to natural and man-made disasters. We can define a rough severity level according to the damage caused: |
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Minor disasters: Technologically, such disasters take you back about 20 years, depriving you of wireless, mobile, and Internet access.
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Medium-Level Disasters: These take you back to around 200 years ago, depriving you of electricity, running water, and sewage systems. You still have food supply, public transportation, highways, and a roof over your head.
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Mega-Disasters: These take you straight to the Iron-Age, some 2,000 years ago, or even worse — back to the days of hunters-gatherers. In addition to the collapse of essential infrastructures, mega-disasters destroy food supply chains, houses, roads, agriculture, and any form of transportation. Katrina's destruction in New Orleans is an instance of such a mega-disaster. |
Each level in this scale implies different basic survival measures as well as different IT disaster recovery measures, ranging between working offline to falling back to paper and pencil. |
Emergency Preparedness Meeting |
You've heard the "backup your computer frequently" mantra dozens of times before. Yet, frequently backed up file won't save your business if they are buried three feet under water and sludge. Besides, what guarantees that these files are truly the ones that your business needs to recover from a disaster? Furthermore, if a mega-disaster takes you back to the Iron Age, will you be able to read these files anyway? Obviously, backups, perse, aren't going to cut it. Instead, a completely different way of thinking is needed. |
Your first step is to set up an emergency preparedness meeting in which all members of your team/company participate. Your goal is to form emergency procedures and answer participants' questions: does the company have an alternative site for emergencies? If so, where is it? Which employees is the critical backbone and which ones can join later? Which facilities (a power generator, computers, etc.) are available on the alternative premise? And so on. |
Your next step is to ask every team leader to decide which files and data are critical for their work. It may seem at first that thousands of files are needed; in reality however, your business can survive with fewer files. Let's see how: |
The Generative Principle |
If you can generate file X from file Y, then you need to backup only the latter (remember: I'm not talking about regular, daily backups but on an emergency specific backup kit). Thus, instead of backing up bulky .exe , .dll , and .obj files, you only need to backup their source files. As a bonus, your critical backup files will weigh several kilobytes rather than dozens of megabytes. |
| Prioritize |
| Standard header files e.g., <vector> and ones that are part of widely-used third party libraries (e.g., Boost) shouldn't be backed up. Yes, you do need these files to compile and run your app's, but your top priority is saving your own precious files -- those that exist only on your computer or local network. |
| Backup Media |
Under normal circumstances, your backup files are stored on external hard drives, CDs, DAT tapes etc. When a disaster strikes, these formats aren't ideal -- they are vulnerable to moisture, heat and jolting. Additionally, they are heavy and require dedicates devices. Remember the emergency kit I mentioned in part I? And do you still remember the disk-on-key I discussed less than a year ago? There's your ideal emergency storage media! A typical disk-on-key nowadays stores 1 or 2 GB of data. More importantly, it weighs less than 30 grams (or 1 oz.), and requires neither electricity nor special devices for reading its data. |
A disk-on-key has another charming property, as you will shortly see. Since your team consists of several members, each one of them should be responsible for backing up his or her critical files on their private disk-on-key. The accumulative storage space of 5 team members is up to 10 GB.
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Where do you store these devices? Either carry them with you all the time (that's what I'm doing, and not just because of the constant high state of alert in this part of the world, but because I can also listen to my favorite music anywhere); or keep them in your emergency kit. |
Most people are well aware of the importance of backing up data files but what about the software they need? As a software developer, your IDE is probably one such critical piece of software, as are your Web browser, e-mail client and perhaps word processor. Under extreme conditions, it's unlikely that you'll be able to take your installation CDs with you to a safe haven. Read my lips: you might be out of business when a disaster occurs, even if you have all the necessary backup files! What can you do to avoid this unhappy state of affairs? First and foremost, open a free Web-based e-mail account that enables you to store 1, 2 or 4 GB in your in box. Copy the installation CDs of your IDE, database engine, Pearl interpreter, and the manuscript of C++ for disillusioned C# and Java programmers book you're working on right now. Store these files in your e-mail account (again, each team member should open a private account). You may need to break the huge files on each CD into smaller files and send them as separate attachment files. This drudgery can be spared if you use dedicated tools that split large files into several smaller files. Remember: you don't have to repeat this tedious process very often so it's a tedious but worthwhile investment. |
| NOTE |
Please check the software's user license before copying the installation files to a remote e-mail server. With open source software tools there should be no problem. However, other software vendors may impose certain restriction on copying their software, even for backups.
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Install once, Run Anywhere |
Another great thing about disk-on-keys: you can install software on them and run it simply by plugging the disk-on-key to any USB port of a computer that runs the same operating system you're using. For example, you can install an e-mail client, word processor, and even a compiler on your disk-on-key, and run them on every computer. Remember, however, that certain software products aren't suitable for this trick. Applications that use registry keys or cookies may not work on a different computer. However, many Open Source products, such as Mazola's Fire fox browser and Thunderbird, work just fine when run from a disk-on-key.
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| As a software developer, you compile source files dozens of times every day to test the latest code changes. However, not every compilation session necessitates the creation of an .exec file. Therefore, if you can't install your main IDE on a disk-on-key, use a lightweight, command-line compiler instead. This way you can continue to work on the same app even if temporarily, you won't be able to create an executable file.
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Summary
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Let's summarize the lessons to take home. Your first task is to summon an emergency preparedness meeting. In this meeting, set an emergency meeting place which can be an office hired specifically for such circumstances. However, it could also be your boss's garage. Instruct your team members that in case of an emergency, they should bring their emergency kits. Ideally, you should run at least one emergency drill to detect weakness points and ensure that your employees/colleagues know their duties. Appoint one member of your team as an emergency preparedness coordinator.
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The most important survival factors for you and your business are awareness and preparedness; the suggestions I've given here are by no means a complete emergency plan. However, they should give you enough pointers and ideas for forming such a plan. Start working on it today |
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