Whilst it’s great to be busy, you can’t often post something to your blog straight away because you haven’t for the time.  Earlier this week the building maintenance people responsible for our office decided that they’d conduct a fire drill, great.

So text book drill, the alarm goes and we all walk out in a calm and orderly fashion to the assembly point, we stand around 10 minutes for the all clear and go back in to continue the day.  Wrong.

At the time, I was actually having a chat with one of the other people from our building about networks and ADSL broadband.  The fire alarm goes off but we keep chatting, figuring it was just a test.  After a few seconds we decide that it’s not a test and that we should take some sort of action.  So text book style, we walk out in a calm and orderly fashion to the assembly point.  Wrong.

If you’re reading this then you’ll have worked out that we’re an IT company.  Not only are we selling computer equipment, but we rely on computers just as much ourselves.  We’ve had our share of clients who have lost data, so just incase it was a real fire we didn’t want to take chances ourselves.

As a user of our own Internet backup service, we already have our server backing up the important stuff on a nightly basis, encrypting as it goes to make sure it’s fully secure and no one can access it with out our password and key.

We check our monitor every morning to make sure that everything worked OK, and touch wood, it’s backed up every night with no problem since it went in.

So log onto the server and kick off the Internet backup, throw the laptop into its bag and then calmly leave the building, walking to the assembly point in an orderly fashion.

Two big lessons to be learn here.

1.  You can’t rely on it being a drill, and if the flames were licking the side of the building I wouldn’t be writing this post.  You shouldn’t mess with fire, and the tale could have come out completely different.

2.  If it were a real fire then the devastation to the business would have been reduced because our electronic data was safe.  Statistically, 43% of businesses that experience a disaster (a fire is such a thing) never recover afterwards.

With our Your-Data product we aim to ensure that if anything happens to your business such as a fire, you can avoid critical data loss and minimise the disruption.  We have packages that start from £7 per month so £84/year compared to the cost of recovering that data you’ve lost, assuming you know what it is in the first place, is common sense.