How prepared are you to get your business up and running in the least amount of time, if you mission critical systems go down? Have you designed a plan to address this? Is doing daily backups of your data enough?

Recently we turned our server off for maintenance and upon reboot the server failed to start. It sat there during boot process with Windows error – corrupt file – system32\drivers\pci.sys repair file by starting windows setup using the original setup CD-Rom

Right off the bet I went looking for the original CDs and could not remember what we had used. Once I found the CD we put it into the server and reloaded all the drivers in boot mode. Turn on the machine again and now we can log into the machine but we started getting all sorts of windows errors. So then we had to decide if the hard drive was bad or was it a windows issue.

We purchased new hard drives and load the image and still no go. We finally realized after about 48 hours that the image itself had gone bad. The hard drive crashed which corrupted the windows image and left us in a very bad state. The next thing we discover is that the server itself was having issues and so now we have a double whammy.

We finally decided to use my laptop to install the most essential applications and transfer the database including client files and get my business up and running while we figure out how to address both the server and hard drive issues.

Moral of the story is: Just backing up of your data is not enough. Every business needs to do a thorough dry run of their disaster recovery plan in the event that you do go completely down. You have no idea if the plan is truly working unless you have tested it out when you are up and running.