This is an excerpt from SmallBusinessSchool.

Let’s look at securing our data from natural disasters.

Vicky: We’ve always backup our system and during the fires I thought “wow you know its been a while since I’ve been in touch with the actual details of what happens with our system” and I call our VIP operations and I said “Ron, do we have our tape, you know our backup tape?” I know we back up but do we have it secure as in the facility. Do I need to go to the office and again it is no it’s our policy to remove that tape every night. I didn’t want my place to burn down but if it did at least I could recreate my customer orders in all those and since it would be devastating if I couldn’t.

Hattie: Bryan how many years ago did you start you think you started taking the tape home every night?

Bryan: That’s probably been about 10 years I’d say.

Hattie: 10 years every night Mr. Discipline.

Bryan: And it continuous today and we checked the backups to make sure they’re good backups every night.

Hattie: Bryan Jacobson and Glen Bailey of Seattle Base Madison Park Greeting and Vicky Carlson owner of San Diego’s Office Pavilion, never leave the valuable day stored in their computers to chance.

Vicky: Well Hattie, Office Pavilion is an office furniture dealership and that’s a little word for a lot of things. We have space planners that will go in and work with the customer to layout the space. Do programming, to understand how they work. What kind of environment they have so that we can create a solution of products to fit within their environment, their space that works with their culture.

Male: Our niche is selling high in products to find independent stores and we do that both to our home product line medicine part greeting and to our strategic partnerships with other publishers and the industry that previously run their own companies and now folded their operations into our headquarters here in Seattle but we run those companies under their own brands and they keep the creative control.

Hattie: Do you remember when this company did not have a computer?

Male: I remember my mother doing all invoices by hand at home after dinner and sending them out and having a little card file for the people that had paid and the people who hadn’t paid.

Male: And that’s we talk about a lot is you know technology 5, 6, 7 years ago we really said lets make sure that we continue to invest in that pretty aggressively so we keep upgrading our system.

Hattie: Okay.

Male: And obviously computer is essential to that.

Vicky: When we first started on the computers in design that was the big revolution for our industry to really help us streamline our processes and start cutting the time down. It was “Oh my God, we never want to go back to tallying up the parts and pieces.” And that brings you the next question, how safe are these computers? Pretty new for us you know how safe is the data?

Hattie: Ron Bush is Vicky’s VP of operations.

Ron: We have a serious of redundant backups. We take the most current Friday tape and we take the most current Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday tape home with us offsite. So that if anything should happen to the facility we have two tapes that are fairly current data sources that we have offsite. And so twice a week our Monday morning and a Wednesday morning, we actually look physically look at the data that was back up the night before from the tape or find the file that’s dated within those two or three days were stored that file and actually open it up and make sure we can read it and access it everything. So that we know were not getting false positive and we go to put the tape back in the system to restore from that tape. We know there’s data there that’s accurate.

Hattie: To keep computing systems humming at Madison Park Greeting Bryan and Glen hired Tracy Armor full time after he had work for them for years on a contract basis.

Male: I think he had to prepare for the worst case scenario at all times just in case I mean your data is probably want the most important assets in your business and that you have to ask yourself a question you know what would happen if I loses data. The network has grown quite a bit. We’ve added two firewalls, first of all to protect the data behind on our network from the outside world. We’re still implementing a tape backup process that has grown more complex. Now we have two back up drives.

Hattie: So you want a dozen?

Male: I do everyday. We back up the servers everyday.

Hattie: Where do you take the tape?

Male: We use a rotation strategy. There’s always at least three copies of the data offsite. I keep one at home, Bryan keeps one in his house and we also have one in a secure location.