Talking to solopreneurs and small businesses lately, IT catastrophes seem to fall into this category: out of mind, out of sight. They pay lip service to avoiding IT catastrophes, but often don’t take the time and effort to build in redundancy and reliability.
Unfortunately, everything breaks. Over the twenty-five odd years I’ve been in technology, I’ve lost:
— at least four internal hard drives
— a bunch of CDs and DVDs
— one external USB hard drive
— a motherboard or two
— and once, I absolutely destroyed my favorite notebook by fumbling it in a parking lot and, in slow motion, watching it hit the pavement and shatter.
Here’s the thing — entropy is real. Matter decays, electronics fail, and data is always at risk. That means your business is at risk.
Data loss is bad. Uptime lost is bad. Productivity lost is bad. If you’re a solopreneur or small business owner, these problems can shut your doors — for good.
So, in the interest of public service, I’m going to spend the next week spelling out my approach for keeping data, and uptime, intact. Overall, it cost me about $1500 (total) to make this happen. I’m not entirely sure that I have this nut cracked, but I’m close.
I’ll cover Hardware, Networking, Applications, Local data protection, remote data protection, and security.
Next post: Why Families Have More than One Kid.