Last week I talked about mini-disasters. Mini-disasters are local catastrophes that are much more likely to affect your business than the large-scale environmental disasters that scare us the most.
By a strange coincidence a few days after I posted the mini-disaster story I was called by one of my new clients. Late on Friday afternoon (why is it always the most inconvenient time) my client had plugged one of their customer’s external disk drives into their PC to start work on a job. The PC promptly shut down and could not be reopened.
What had happened? This was another form of mini-disaster. The external drive had drained too much power from the PC and had destroyed the hard drive. The computer was useless and the information on it not recoverable. The client had no information or tools to deliver their work.
The client was worried and called us right away. Had they lost all their information? Would they be able to finish the job for their customer as they said they would? Were they going to have to tell their customer they had a computer failure? Would they look foolish and perhaps lose the customer?
This story has a happy ending. This client’s backup was with The Vault Corporation so everything was available to restore their system. They had their PC urgently repaired (by a reputable and reliable provider I recommended) and we restored their data and operating systems by that Saturday afternoon.
They finished their customer’s job by Monday and their customer was happy. In fact their customer never even knew that a mini-disaster had happened!
The moral of the story is that you must have a good backup system in place or even a mini-disaster will lose you income and perhaps your reputation.