I Survived the Crash of 2010

Like hur­ri­canes and car acci­dents I have been in, Sep­tem­ber
24, 2010 is a day I’m not likely to ever for­get. Not so much because I
was in the mid­dle of writ­ing  a press release that needed to get out
and got lost when the server at crashed or because the 10 days of email
that were recov­ered look spotty like it isn’t all there. But because of
the reflec­tions and lessons since.

I wasn’t affected as much as some of my
col­leagues because I keep a lot of my work on a cyber cloud or thumb
drive so I always have access to it. Though this isn’t a tuto­r­ial on
exter­nal backup I’m going to tell you that if you don’t do it you need
to start or you’ll end up explor­ing ugly dis­as­ter recov­ery if you
have a sys­tems crash.

Whether you run a one per­son
con­sul­tancy with a lap­top or a larger net­worked enter­prise with
mul­ti­ple com­put­ers churn­ing out mega data, it is a huge
dis­rup­tion and incon­ve­nience to con­duct­ing busi­ness as usual if
what you need is not avail­able. If it’s not retriev­able — and quickly,
might I add — you can suf­fer poten­tially irrepara­ble loss.  If you
back up to an exter­nal hard drive located next to your com­puter or
server that is located in the same build­ing and that build­ing burns
down or some com­peti­tor sends a ninja to steal it, you’ll wish you had
used an off site back up ser­vice and that your data was encrypted in a
vault on a cloud with mul­ti­ple data cen­ters around the globe for
ensured retriev­abil­ity, secu­rity and peace of mind. With all the
tech­nol­ogy avail­able at very rea­son­able prices to back up and
secure per­sonal and busi­ness data, if you don’t don’t do it and do it
the right way — don’t expect sym­pa­thy if all your  dig­i­tal media and
hard work go up in smoke.

The event recon­firmed to me why it’s a
good thing I mon­i­tor my rep­u­ta­tion online to ensure it would never
be a lia­bil­ity or embar­rass­ment to me, my employer or my mother (hi
mom =)). The first cou­ple days after the crash I got fil­ing and
clean­ing done, went out for lunch and made calls about things I would
nor­mally send email for. After the sec­ond day when I stopped
believ­ing it “would be up in an hour” I started bring­ing my per­sonal
lap­top and picked up free wifi from down­town Pub­lic Square.

Peo­ple found me.…

Face­book and LinkedIn mes­sage traf­fic
picked up and my per­sonal email account started to receive work
related email. I received more text and instant mes­sages. No one
com­plained, most never even men­tioned that the email they sent to my
work account was being kicked back. The rerout­ing of com­mu­ni­ca­tion
and data migra­tion  hap­pened nat­u­rally with­out me post­ing even one
mes­sage any­where about my email being down. It reminds me of a
doc­u­men­tary I watched in grade school sci­ence class about ant
colonies. The worker ants car­ried things many times their weight along a
path and if the path was obstructed they would just find another path.
But they would get there.

Peo­ple who had my vcard info or to whom
I had given a busi­ness card did not have my per­sonal email, social
media pro­file info or per­sonal web­site URL. Yet, they found me. If
you are think­ing I’ve lost it and that’s what Google is for… that’s
exactly what a pro­fes­sor at Kings Col­lege said when I met with her
after receiv­ing a notice about a Global Land­scapes Con­fer­ence plan­ning meet­ing to my per­sonal email.

Well Karla, you know, in these days of Google… Dr. Bindu Vyas

**As a side note, if you are
inter­ested in attend­ing or speak­ing at the con­fer­ence check it out —
I would love to see you here in Wilkes-Barre, PA!

She had googled me for alter­na­tives…
To my credit, I was easy to find because I under­stand and prac­tice
good SEO. To my credit what she found when she searched me didn’t make
her think twice about send­ing the plan­ning meet­ing invi­ta­tion to
me. To my credit, my per­sonal email address isn’t some­thing like
[email protected] — my email is innocu­ous and wouldn’t be
offen­sive to any­one, it’s my name. To my credit, I under­stand I could
jeop­ar­dize my cred­i­bil­ity through care­less­ness or not
under­stand­ing the impor­tance of pos­i­tive pro­fes­sional branding.

There are many lessons here to con­sider if this has never hap­pened to you.

The mul­ti­ple ways I have enabled
peo­ple to com­mu­ni­cate with me could be seen by some as a curse, an
encroach­ment on my per­sonal life.. and I know peo­ple who do feel that
way. In my opin­ion they helped me sur­vive the crash of 2010 in a
fairly seam­less way with min­i­mal impact.

Have you had to deal with a crash or extended down­time? How did you deal with it?

P.S. Because of this expe­ri­ence,
my mind is wheel­ing about the way we employ com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools.
Another day I’ll post about my thoughts on indi­vid­ual unique
iden­ti­fiers for seam­less com­mu­ni­ca­tion and in the mean­time if
you are an Inter­net archi­tect look­ing for the next big step in
evo­lu­tion and would like to talk about it let me know.

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I Survived the Crash of 2010

I typed Craig N. Piso, Ph. D. to Present Increasing Employee Engagement and Satisfaction at …. and I was distracted by someone outside of my office calling out that we were down. I couldn’t save, send, open, nada.. It was true. I lost what I was working on but it was OK, I would just go to lunch a little early, stay a little long and come back to normal to pick up where I had left off. Wrongo…
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