Tales of woe and destruction - preventing data loss due to disasters - includes checklist for disaster planning

Home Office Computing, March, 1993 by Judith Broadhurst

Mike Ward remembers one of the fires he helped combat as a fire marshal in Fairfax County, Virginia, because it seemed to be such a fluke. Yet it just as easily could have happened to him.

A car crashed into a utility pole, which knocked out the power to a neighborhood where a couple ran three data-dependent businesses from their townhouse. The blackout caught them in the middle of online research for a project on deadline, so they went to the library to finish their work.

That could have been the worst of it and the end of this story. But they forgot about the snack they put in the toaster oven just before the power failed.

When the juice came back on, so did the toaster oven. With nobody home to notice, the sandwiches caught fire and burnt up $7,000 worth of the kitchen, even though firefighters quickly doused the blaze.

That was bad enough, but there's more. Their office was in a spare room directly above the kitchen, so heat from the fire damaged the data disks and destroyed the computers. They had no paper copies and no data backups stored off-site. They lost all their data, worth thousands of dollars.

"I operate a knowledge business from home, part-time, too, so that one really made me think," says Ward, who's not at liberty to divulge the victims' names.

Precious few business owners take the precautions to protect themselves against potential disaster--be it flood, fire, theft, hurricane, or earthquake. If anything, their only concession to the chance of catastrophe it to keep backup files. Even then, they do little to protect the backups against damage: Or they insure their business equipment, but do little to insure the files.

But flukes such as Ward describes can happen anywhere, anytime. For instance, when Roz Ellis hired someone to paint her Manhattan apartment, a worker set a can of paint on the pilot light of her gas stove, and whoosh! "The entire kitchen was gutted," Ellis says. "Gone, like it didn't exist." A simple paint job turned into an ongoing nightmare.

One of the painters was badly burned but survived. Ellis's event-management service, Elegant Events, almost didn't. Her paper records were damaged by smoke. She carried only $14,000 in insurance for a $37,000 claim. Her insurance didn't pay enough to cover temporary lodging, which forced her to stay in her home with no place to cook, soaked carpets, and soot-blackened walls. The smell of smoke sickened her stomach, and the constant reconstruction racket and comings and goings of workers jangled her nerves.

She suspended her usual marketing efforts. That was last August. By the time she was able to use her office again, in November, the booking season for holiday parties had passed. Ellis estimates she lost close to $50,000 in business during her busiest time of the year. To make things worse, she still finds ashes from the fire in her kitchen cabinets. "It's not a nice way to live," she says. "I wish I had had more insurance."

But even a good insurance policy won't necessarily protect you against business upheaval. Raymond and Marjorie Jassin had separate homeowner's, business, and computer insurance policies that adequately covered the law-library management service they run from their home on Long Island (along with two in-house and 20 outside employees). They had invested in a hard-wired burglar- and fire-alarm system that rings into a central monitoring station. Still, after a fire gutted their house on New Year's Day last year and melted all their fax machines, copiers, and computers, it was eight months before they could operate normally.

"We wished we had taken a better inventory of our personal belongings," says Marjorie. "Taking that inventory in the middle of winter, in a dark, burned-out, wet home was the most traumatic part of the whole experience."

The day after the fire, the Jassins set up shop at the kitchen table of one of the company's vice presidents, routed all phone lines there, and began to put things back together. Miraculously, although their computers had basically been destroyed, they were able to recover data files from one hard-disk drive.

"One of the things that we hadn't anticipated was the installation cost of all the equipment," says Ray. "Despite all our insurance, we were not covered for that. You do things throughout the years. As you upgrade one piece at a time, the cost is minimal. Altogether, we incurred a $7,000 or $8,000 loss in installation alone. But we survived both the fire and the economic slowdown, so that's a good test of a business."

A FIRESTORM, A QUAKE, A HURRICANE

Freak occurrences are bad enough, but in widespread natural disasters, much in the news the past few years (Hurricane Hugo in South Carolina, Hurricane Andrew in Florida, the California earthquake, the East Coast's recent vicious northeaster), the destruction is often more monumental.

Peter Stackpole, a well-known San Francisco-area photographer who has worked for Life magazine, lost his home, along with 20 years' worth of negatives, in the Bay Area firestorm in 1991. "I rescued about five small but heavy metal containers that happened to miss the heat of the fire," he says. "But the rest turned into rivers of metal flowing down the hill. Everything just melted."