Your Disaster Recovery Plan

In the last post, we posited some questions about the security of your data, and the need for a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan.

A DR plan can be quite complex for a business. But let's think about your personal DR plan.

All those pictures, financial files, writings, etc are stored on your computer at home. The loss of some of that information can be devastating. Think of all the pictures that you have of you children or important events in your life.

At my house, we have piles of printed pictures. And we are slowly digitizing them with a scanner (a Canon M600, an excellent scanner and color printer, by the way). They are stored on the hard drive, and we use Picassa (along with Photoshop Elements) to manage and print the pictures. My wife creates a lot of scrapbook pages with those scanned pictures. (In fact, all of her 'scrapping' is taking up more space in the home office each day. Another story.)

So, thinking of how to back up that data, we got a DVD writer (external USB version at first; then an internal version next). Since all of our data is stored in the "My Documents" folder on our Windows computer, we just copy all of that folder to a DVD (it takes several DVDs, and a bit of time). The DVDs are then labeled, and I bring them to the office and stick them in a locked drawer.

So, in case of the unthinkable (fire, theft, hard disk failure), we've got a fairly current copy of all those important pictures and other data. And it is stored off-site at the work office. If the hard drive goes 'south', we can replace it, reinstall all the applications, and restore the backed up data. That will take some time to do, but the data will not be lost.

What is your Disaster Recovery strategy? Comments welcomed.