I wrote previously on disaster recovery planning for the medical office (and we have an audio teleseminar coming out in the near future on just this subject). If you connect to your office from home, it’s a good idea to have a disaster recovery plan in place for your home office as well. I had a chance to personally put a plan into effect when my house was struck by lightning – for the second time in three years.

Well, it wasn’t actually a direct hit. I was awakened early one morning last week by what sounded like a mortar going off in the back yard. There was no loss of power but several electronic devices were affected: a wireless router, two switches, a satellite receiver, a digital phone, the alarm system and, oh, yes, my desktop computer.

Not my wife’s computer, and not the kids’ computers, but mine. It was connected to a back up battery with a surge protector. The only thing that was not running through the surge protector was the ethernet cable. I am still waiting for a new power supply to arrive from Dell so I don’t know the full extent of the damage.

The electricians and technicians who have descended upon the house these past several days suspect that the lightning hit the ground and came back up through wiring such as cable or phone line and got into the network wiring. So now we are keeping several tradesmen busy trying to patch things back together. And I am trying to reconstruct my digital life. All this as we are bracing for Hurricane/Tropical Storm Fay to hit in the wee hours of the night.

So, here’s a list of things you can do to protect yourself from total chaos in the event of a disaster such as a lightning strike:

• Make sure your computer is on a good surge protector with a backup battery. Some come with software that will automatically close your applications and shut down your computer.
• Run any type of wiring (cable, telephone, ethernet) that connects to computers or sensitive electronic equipment through surge protectors as well. I neglected to do this with the network cable – still unsure if this was the cause of the failure.
• Use an automated backup system for your computer data. I use an online backup service from Mozy.com but there are several good ones out there. Every night it backs up all the types of files that I have designated.
• As double protection, I also back up files with a portable hard drive and keep it at the office. These have really come down in price – you can get 500GB of storage for less than a hundred dollars in a device the size of a deck of cards. They usually come preloaded with their own backup software.
• Don’t forget to backup files that are not routinely backed up. I keep an Outlook folder with the download links and registration keys for all downloaded applications. I regularly make a copy of my Outlook folders including contacts by exporting the .pst file and saving it in the Documents folder.
• Clone your hard drive onto another hard drive or computer. You can literally have a carbon copy of your current computer on another machine. The only hitch with this method is that certain programs (such as Quicken) can only be run on one machine at a time if it is synchronized with their online backup service.
• Install a stand-by generator. We have frequent power outages in Florida due to thunderstorms. After a triple-whammy by three hurricanes a couple of years back, we installed a stand-by generator that runs on natural gas and automatically kicks on if the power goes out. Although you can get a large one that can run an entire house, we have just enough to run essentials like refrigerators, microwave, a single air conditioner unit, and power for the master suite where the entire family can camp out. And yes, in Florida in the summer, an air conditioner is considered an essential.

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