I need to develop a good disaster recovery plan for my home office. Recently
I
consolidated two of my office computers so that I now do all my work on just
one PC. I’m also beginning to purchase various office upgrades, such as a Firewire
card, copier, and fax machine.
All this work on infrastructure has gotten me to thinking about how best to
protect myself against loss of data.

One technique I’ve used in the past is to periodically copy important files
to
a ZIP disk. However, that technique has long since become impractical due to
the collective size of my important files. Most recently, I’ve backed up
critical files by copying them back and forth between my two office computers.
But that’s become rather inconvenient since I’ve consolidated
my work onto one PC. Now I often find myself going for days, even weeks, using
the "Hail Mary, please don’t let anything break!" approach to disaster
planning.

Clearly I need a better solution to protecting my data. And I want to take
a
more wholistic approach than just backing up my files. I work from a home
office, and the important thing, really, is not to protect just my files but
rather to protect my ability to do income-producing work. With that in mind,
I’m going to begin by thinking about all the things that might go wrong:

• A major disaster such as a house-fire could cause me to loose everything,
  computers, disks, peripherals, paper files, books, even my office itself.
• My hard-drive could fail, causing me to lose all my data files.
• Some other component in my computer could fail, leaving my data intact on
  the hard-drive, but with no working computer to access that data.
• One of my peripherals, a printer for example, or a monitor, could fail.
• I might accidentally delete a critical file.
• I could get hit by the proverbial truck.

Have I missed anything? I hope not. In a future weblog entry, I’ll be thinking
out loud about how best to protect myself from each of these possible scenarios.
Actually, I shouldn’t say how "best" to protect myself. The issue
is really how do "want" to protect myself. How much disruption do
I want to tolerate and does that change given the circumstances?

Next, it’s worth taking inventory of the different types of electronic files
that I need to protect:

• Digital photos, family pictures and such that I’ve taken with my digital
  camera
• Master copies of my website files
• Files for the various books and magazine articles that I’ve written in the
  past
• Files for whatever book(s) and magazine articles I’m currently writing
• Files for books that I’m editing as part of my day-job
• Email files: archived emails and my address book
• Various personal files such as my resume, address labels, my Microsoft Money
  file, and so forth.

Obviously some files are more important than others, especially with respect
to earning a living. I’ll be thinking outloud about this issue too. The criticality
of certain files, or the lack thereof, certainly must be factored into whatever
disaster plan I ultimately develop.

It’s not just my data that needs protecting either. My daughter has an old
notebook computer on which she writes her journal and various short-stories.
There’s a computer in the dining room that my wife uses for various things.
And I have a Linux box in my office runing a small database that I’d like to
protect. I need a plan or solution that takes all of these disparate computers
into account.

Lastly, I really want an automated, set-and-forget, solution. My daughter hasn’t
backed up her files in months. My wife never does. Even I don’t make backups
often enough. And I certainly don’t want the overhead of having to run around
physically to four different computers in order to copy files to backup media.
The less I need to run around and do things, the more successful my plan will
be.

That’s it for today. In a day or two, I’ll begin drilling down more deeply
into some of the issues I’ve identified here.

What do you think? Have I missed anything? Am I on the right track? If you have a home office, what does your recovery plan look like?