An overheard snippet of conversation yesterday regarding tropical storm Erin seems like good reason to talk briefly about Disaster Recovery plans.  Do you have remote offices in severe weather or natural disaster prone areas of the country?  Do you have a procedure to follow when a predictable event (Hurricane, snowstorm ...) threatens to close down business?  The plan, can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be.  Personally, I like simple.

Say you have an office in an area known to get frequent hurricanes.  A brief checklist detailing steps for an out of rotation full backup, shipping the tapes to the home office, and gracefully powering down systems (before the situation becomes so bad you get trapped, no heroes please) is a great way to make sure your data is protected in a worst case scenario.

One last piece of advice.  Don't wait until the last minute to ship your backup media.

If the event will happen on Friday afternoon, you may want to make your backups on Wednesday night and ship them on Thursday.

Mail service as well as package pickup and delivery from the big carriers are often suspended earlier than you might like, leaving your backup media in a drop box or local pickup facility during the incident.  Not that I would know anything about that ... ;)

- Christopher Carboni