In 2009, my office had a devastating fire. The fire started very early in the morning and wasn’t discovered for a couple of hours. It was a very hot, slow burning fire, and there was a lot of smoke and heat damage. The fire originated in a large room where two of my staff members’ workstations were located. My office and another staff members’ office were across the hall, and basically everything in the whole area was termed “non-salvage” by the disaster recovery folks.
Fortunately, we had taken much of our expensive video and photography equipment out of the building the night before because we were getting ready for a big event. However, we had another large event in two weeks, and we needed to finish some projects that were on computers located within the fire zone. Our IT company was fabulous and was able to retrieve the files we needed off our systems and get us up and running again with a few days, but I swore that I would never be in the situation where I was praying for us to be able to retrieve data from computers in a disaster again.
For the office file servers, we decided to go with a virtual server environment with daily off-site back-up. For our photo and video files, we decided that off-site daily back-up would be too expensive, but that we could live with a weekly backup. We’re using an application that backs up selected drives nightly, grooms for file changes, and catalogs the files. The image and video files are kept on a separate physical server and the hard drives for two of our Mac computers also are backed up to preserve any video projects we are working on.
We also purchased a fire-rated safe for our video tapes for current projects to provide some protection should we have another disaster.
By using the virtual environment, we would be able to be up and running within hours rather than days following a disaster, allowing us to set up operations at another location with minimal difficulty. The weekly off-site back-up allows us to lose on up to five days of work on a project rather than the entire project. While not idea, it is certainly better than having to start completely over or having to re-shoot a project.