Wednesday, March 17, 2004

Disaster Recovery

I had a hard reset during a meeting yesterday. It was my own fault: for some reason an iSilo file I had downloaded was showing a Docs to Go creator ID and I tried to open it in DTG. The Palm froze and a soft reset just resulted in a flashing Palm logo. So I had to do a hard reset.

All this happened without anyone in the room thinking I was doing anything more than fiddling around with my Palm.

Having done the hard reset I was able to restore my data from the back-up which BackupBuddy VFS had made at 3 a.m. that morning. So within 10 minutes I was back with my full resources at my side and no one even guessed that I had done the electronic equivalent of putting my Filofax in the washing machine.

Of course, I had lost any data entered since 3 a.m., but the good thing is that one can usually remember such recent things and as soon as I was back in my office, a Hotsync restored the missing records.

Newcomers to the PDA world fall into two camps, those who don't understand the risks and make inadequate back-ups, and those who fear that 'if something goes wrong with it', they will lose all their information. My experience yesterday shows that not even the most serious of computer failures, a hard reset, need cause more than a ripple in your workflow (so long as you have a good back-up routine).