On 6/1/08 a fire consumed some soundstages at Universal Studios, including the well known set main street/courthouse set from the movie, Back to the Future. More importantly, it burned the video vault containing 40 to 50 thousand videos and films. Imagine the impact on their business, if there wasn’t another set of videos and film negatives stored in a backup vault in a separate location!
Insurance can pay for repairs, relocate your business to another location, and replace damaged equipment, but if you don’t have a backup copy of vital records, how can you replace what money can’t buy?
A good friend of mine was the risk management officer at one of the most important banks in NY, whose headquarters was destroyed on 9/11. When the board had an emergency meeting the next day at an off-site location, the President asked what had become of their vital records. While their accounting records and other transactional computer records were backed up at a separate data center, the question arose regarding contracts, the bank’s charter, and other vital records. At that point, my friend opened his briefcase and pulled out a set of CDs, and announced that, thanks to procedures he had set up over a year before the event, backup copies of the vital data were maintained at multiple locations.
Simply creating backup disks at a frequency that is appropriate to your business and taking them off site to your home (if it is sufficiently distant from your office) will allow you to restore your vital records in most disaster scenarios.
But what about all those paper records?
- One approach is to simply store a photocopy at an archive facility, but that can become unwieldy and expensive if you have a large volume of paper records.
- The alternative is to scan paper records into computer files and save those files to optical (CD or DVD) or magnetic disks at multiple locations.
Whatever method you use to back up your records, you need a scheme for indexing or organizing the backup copies so that you can assemble them to recreate your records. For some businesses and practices, indexing the records by client, type of record, and date will be sufficient.
Setting up and implementing a scheme for backing up your vital records is one of the cheapest form of insurance you can provide for your business or professional practice.
{ 0 comments… add one now }
Leave a Comment