Prepare for the Worst, Plan for the Best: Disaster Preparedness and Recovery for Small Businesses

Chapter 9. Take Five

The most valuable information I can share with you is to improve your business processes from lessons learned by our peers in the small business community. I have set up a Web site for that purpose, www.preparedsmallbusiness.com. Another important lesson is that you must test your disaster preparedness plan. There are some risks that you cannot reasonably anticipate without performing a drill. Let me share two stories with you to reinforce this point. When speaking at an event of the National Association of Women Business Owners, I met a business owner who told me how she had backed up all of her business critical data online and off-site. Brilliant—she had her tax records, customer information, and all critical data secured. Then she made a secondary backup in the event that the first one would fail. Also brilliant—in my case, I have backups stored at locations removed from one another by more than 500 miles such that in the event one has a problem, I have redundancy. But she did not test her backups. When disaster struck, she found, to her horror, that her primary backup was defective because it did not capture all of her data; only a random sample of some business data. Then she turned to her secondary backup and learned that it was not an independent backup of the original data, but rather a copy of the defective primary backup. She did not have two independent backup sets of data, she had duplicates of a single defective set. With advance testing, this ...