Keeping Computers Safe From Fire And Heat
There are some disasters you can avoid completely.
The fates won’t rest a Big Mac on your keyboard, but you might.
There are others you can’t — like acts of God, acts of your cranky neighbor, terrorists, or the weather.
The trick here is to plan for their possibility and take steps that make sense in context of managing risk
Heat Is The Enemy Of All Things Electronic
Pssst — fires are hot. Very.
While electronics generate their own heat (which can be significant, and if not managed well can be a problem too, see below) first we are concerned with external destructive heat like your building burning down.
A piece of paper can be locked in a box that will most likely withstand most any conventional fire. So can a data storage item like a diskette or jump-drive, in theory, but the damage point of such devices may be well below their melting point.
Fire Can Easily Destroy Everything In A Building
This might be obvious but we have seen smart people do some pretty dumb things, like keep the original of some data on a computer, keep a backup of the data on a CD in the desk on which the computer is sitting, and keep another backup in a lockbox in the closet six feet from that desk.
Sure, if the computer drive dies you’re fine, but how hard is it to imagine a fire that destroys everything in a single room? It’s easy.
We’ll consider how to survive a fire (from a data and systems perspective) in a few minutes, but first, let’s outline some guidelines. These are useful for more than just fires, too.
· Keep backups in separate physical locations. And we don’t mean here, and four feet from here. We mean here, and Cleveland. Or here, and the World Wide Web. Or here, and in a safety deposit box on the other side of town.
· Update your backups on some understandable schedule. We knew a guy who smugly told us (after his office burned down) he was “all set” because he had backups. Well, he had backups up until about two years before the fire and nothing sooner, which rendered them almost useless. Use it or lose it, as they say.
· Have good insurance on your office equipment. Also, pay the premiums…