Ready to test your BCP?

Most large organization make sure to do Business Continuity Planning (BCP), also known as Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP), because they understand the importance of keeping their information intact and secure no matter what happens. Unfortunately, few individuals ever think about such planning — even though in many ways it’s just as important.
Stop and think for a moment: What would you do if your condo building caught fire right now and your computers were ruined? Or your home was broken into and your laptop stolen? How would this affect your personal information? What about the letters, files, photos and projects that were on your hard drive?
If you’ve had a computer hard drive die, you probably have had to deal with a similar reality, and hopefully now have a backup plan in place. But if you haven’t had these things happen to you, you need to plan now.
Get an external hard drive, back up all of your data and move that external hard drive to another physical location. You can also get access to a remote machine and securely copy all of your data over to it.
Once this is finished, you now don’t have to worry if your computers are stolen or catch fire in the next few weeks or months. But what happens when they’re stolen in a year from now? Now you need to create a regular process of backing up your data, and making sure it’s not in the same physical location.
You get bonus points if the data is encrypted on your computers as well as the backups, so in the case of theft, the thieves won’t have access to any of your personal information.
If this post gets just one person to follow these steps, and it helps them save their information, it was worth it.