Disaster planning is a must

Apologies for the lack of newsletters - for those of you who've been onto the web - you will know why ... for those of you who have had better things to do, my laptop's harddrive went to silicon heaven last Thursday and has had to be re-built....

A couple of lessons from that one...

Always backup those "strange" software bits n pieces to an external hard drive, so you don't have to waste time and bandwidth downloading them again.

Always make sure you have mission critical documents and files in multiple locations so your dataloss is minimal (thankfully that was done).

And always back up your mailing lists so you don't have to rebuild them.... lessons learnt - every single one of them.

A second interesting lesson from Monday morning - my next door neighbours - they of the noise and the million cats.... well their house was totally gutted this morning by fire. Turns out the couch was too close to the fire and - they lost absolutely everything, including quite a few of the cats. The reason the fire caught so quickly was simple - they lived in a rather untidy and haphazard way .... and yes I am being kind. OK, stig of the dump's place was tidier than my neighbours place . always one in every neighborhood and unfortunately they lived next door to me ...

We were evacuated...no time to pick up anything, except what was on the way to the door...in my case, handbag - in it, phone and camera. I'll post some pics when I get the chance.

My neighbours, do not have insurance.....

I do.

One thing I will do, and this has also taught me a very valuable lesson - send your mission critical information offsite... backup important files to an internet mail account, just in case you don't have time to pick up your computer. Pick up the kids and the animals and get the heck out of the place.

But one final lesson for today - make an inventory of everything you value, photos, jewellery, take pics and store them electronically, same with policy documents, insurance etc. And for me, those books, music and DVD's you've collected. I've got some first edition books and a complete collection of several authors. Hardly something you can pick up and carry in a hurry - but if you know what you had, you can replace them if you need to. So make an inventory if you haven't already.

Given that we had one of the worst storms in living memory on Friday, and now this - its time to organise the disaster planning / disaster response.