Hurricane season is upon us and here at DTI Data we are particularly aware of the damage that these storms can inflict since we are on the coast line in Florida. Being prepared for a hurricane means more than having plenty of batteries for your flashlight, it also means being prepared to protect your data. Hard drive recovery of a disk that has gone through a hurricane can be tricky business. More times than not, water damage is present as well as electronic problems that arise from power failures and brown outs.Hurricane

Hurricane Preparation And Prevention

All of us that live in hurricane zones have to contend with evacuations, flooding and days or weeks without electricity as well as taking steps to protect and preserve our data. For those of us who have off site servers, we can utilize FTP based backup solutions to store our data off site. There are services that the rest of you can use to backup your data online. A quick Google search for “online backup” will show you plenty of services that are out there. I personally haven’t used any because I use a program that encrypts, compresses and uploads my data to one of our webservers. Check out my post about backup solutions for more info.

The first thing you need to do is to audit your data. What files can you not live without? Having an idea of how much data you have to store can help isolate the media you will need to take with you in case of evacuation. If there is a storm brewing you should have enough time to prepare. You can get the National Hurricane Center RSS Feed and add your region’s news to your Google or Yahoo home page or whatever news reader you use to keep updated.

If you are unable to evacuate your computers another option is to travel with your hard drives. Taking your disks with you is one way to avoid hard drive recovery, as long as you are careful about how you store your drives. Our post about hard drive recovery has hard drive packaging instructions which can show you how to best protect your disks. If you have sensitive data you can also clone your hard drive and store it in a safe deposit box that is out of the hurricane and evacuation zones. Our product Speed Clone can make a sector copy of your hard disk drive that you can plug back into the machine if the original disk gets damaged.

If you have any questions about ways to protect your data and eliminate the requirement for hard drive recovery feel free to call us toll free at 1-866-438-6932.

The next article in this series will take a look back at Hurricane Katrina and the Hurricane disaster recovery relief efforts DTI Data was involved in.

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