Identifying and organising your information

While it is clearly important that you take steps to prevent disaster, by making sure that your information is physically safe, free of malware and protected by a good firewall and strong passwords, on their own these steps are not enough. There are simply too many things that can go wrong, including virus attacks, hackers, electrical short circuits, power spikes, water spills, theft, confiscation, demagnetisation, operating system crashes and hardware failure, to name just a few. Preparing for disaster is just as important as defending against it.

The first step to formulating a backup policy is to picture where your personal and work information is currently located. Your email, for example, may be stored on the provider's mail server, on your own computer, or in both places at once. And, of course, you might have several email accounts. Then, there are important documents on the computers you use, which may be in the office or at home. There are address books, chat histories and personal program settings. It is also possible that some information is stored on removable media as well, including USB memory sticks, portable hard drives, CDs, DVDs, and old floppy disks. Your mobile phone contains a list of contacts and may have important text messages stored in it. If you have a website, it may contain a large collection of articles built up over years of work. And, finally, don't forget your non-digital information, such as paper notebooks, diaries and letters.

Next, you need to define which of these files are 'master copies,' and which are duplicates. The master copy is generally the most up-to-date version of a particular file or collection of files, and corresponds to copy that you would actually edit if you needed to update the content. Obviously, this distinction does not apply to files of which you have only one copy, but it is extremely important for certain types of information. One common disaster scenario occurs when only duplicates of an important document are backed up, and the master copy itself gets lost or destroyed before those duplicates can be updated. Imagine, for example, that you have been travelling for a week while updating the copy of a particular spreadsheet that you keep on your USB memory stick. At this point, you should begin thinking of that copy as your master copy, because the periodic, automated backups of the outdated version on your office computer are no longer useful.

Try to write down the physical location of all master and duplicate copies of the information identified above. This will help you clarify your needs and begin to define an appropriate backup policy. The table below is a very basic example. Of course, you will probably find that your list is much longer, and contains some 'storage devices' with more than one 'data type' and some data types that are present on multiple devices.

In the table above, you can see that:

• The only documents that will survive if your office computer's hard drive crashes are the duplicates on your USB memory stick and the CD copies at home.
• You have no offline copy of your email messages or your address book, so if you forget your password (or if someone manages to change it maliciously), you will lose access to them.
• You have no copies of any data from your mobile phone.
• You have no duplicate copies, digital or physical, of printed documents such as contracts and invoices.