Recently my computer died a horrible death. Of course it wasn’t on a Friday afternoon where I would then have all weekend to fix it – it happened on a Monday morning. Gee, thanks. I formatted the drive and began rebuilding. But the reality was, I couldn’t stop working to do the rebuild all at once. It reminded me of when my husband and I moved from our first apartment to our first house. We moved most of it ourselves over our last month of the lease agreement. While it was endless and exhausting, at the end of the month we had very few boxes left to unpack. Same thing happened here.
I started by thinking about what I needed immediately. The beautiful thing was some systems just ran. My blog post was written and scheduled so that just happened, certain social media posts for clients went on like normal, and I was able to manage email and my calendar from my phone. Once Windows was back up and running, I reinstalled my software first. That was vital to getting back into the world. I had it all stored in one place with the codes in the boxes. It went as easily and quickly as it could.
Next, I restored my email. That was the most important thing to getting back into contact with people. I was able to download those files from my off-site backup (I use Backblaze) and restore them. Now as far as the world was concerned, I was back. From there I restored what I needed when I needed it until I had everything. I then downloaded a file full backup and went back to work.
The point here is I had a plan and work that plan in case this happens. For most of my clients they either didn’t know what was happening on my end or only figured it out when I told them. I was there – I was present – even though I was completely discombobulated in my office (which is exactly how I felt).
My plan included where I stored my disks for software, where I stored downloaded software (in both the off-site backup and an external drive), how I manage software codes, and how I prioritized getting back on line. I was prepared for the situation so when it happened, it happened behind the curtain.
Since you can’t plan when the problem will strike, I encourage you to take time this week to look at your processes and what would happen if you were down. Could you answer your phone? Get your email? Could you get back up and running in less than an hour? If you aren’t sure, fix it. Even confident in my plan it was no fun to be confronted with testing it!
Leave a Reply