Business Continuity: Real Life Stories
Computer Crash Nearly Totals Grant Opportunity
For Deborah Hopkins, president of St. Louis based Christian Management Resources, it wasn’t an earthquake or a hurricane that almost spelled disaster for her small company, it was the most common of computer problems, a crashed hard drive. Right in the middle of preparing a critical grant application, with the deadline approaching, her company’s computer suddenly crashed completely.
“We were between offices, so I was using only one computer at the time, Ms. Hopkins remembers, “but suddenly as we faced this inflexible grant application deadline, the computer crashed completely. We were not backing up every day and some of the backup we had was old or the tape system was not very effective, so basically everything we had and needed was suddenly inaccessible. We faced a disaster.”
Ms. Hopkins consulted all sorts of experts of experts over the next three days. Most told her the only option was to reformat her hard drive thus losing all her data, especially all the data relating to the grant application. Things looked truly dire.
“At about 4:00 in the morning I suddenly remembered something I had learned years before in programming,” she relates, “and I called a help desk and they helped me through partitioning the hard drive and then reformatting only the new partition and re-installing the operating system there, keeping my data on the old partition.”
The Hail Mary worked, and she got access to her data and was able to finish the grant application. But this episode taught her a valuable lesson.
“We now operate with three computers and we back up every night onto CD’s which are stored offpremise. I am now looking at ways of backing up more efficiently and storing the data at a remote site. I’ll never forget those three days and two nights.”
Source: http://www.score.org/pdf/HP_Download_ImpactofDisaster.pdf