Where would you be?

Yesterday, I listened to a presentation given by the Oklahoma Bar Association's tech-guru, Jim Calloway. Jim's presentation stressed the importance of having digital backups of all of our office materials. To emphasize the point, Jim showed pictures of law firm files following Katrina. He stated that it would be near impossible to reconstruct a client's file from the water-soaked & trash-infested mess. I think the same principle holds true for any other type of disaster.

Jim's newest blog post features a discussion of another concern, computer crashes. I know what a problem they are on my home computer, heaven forbid our office systems go down.

So in light of the disaster and inconvenience factors, my question is, what are you doing to protect your most valuable assets? In all reality, do you have a list of programs you regularly run, with their code keys written down? Or, do you trust yourself to remember that every 30 days or more you use "that" program. As Jim notes, it's those little tweaks that will get you - like all your special formatting functions for Dragon.

I'm one of the odd few that actually likes formatting my hard drive and performing a clean install. I typically clean the hard drive every 45 days (more if I'm busy). The pain though is having to do the program updates. If you're vigilant though, sometimes you can avoid the stress.

My best advice, take a minute to open your programs directory and see what you're regularly running. Then for the next week (or month) write down every program you use. Also, write down the pass key for each. Store this in some easy to find place.

As for your own personal "Katrina," question what your firm/home is doing to protect your information. Can you easily access your files away from your office? Would you be able to run your office from your home? Hotel? Hawaii? And finally, but I think most important, is there someone else who knows your backup/recovery procedures, who could replace you if necessary?

It's malpractice if you're not backing up your client files. Arguably, it's malpractice if you're not digitizing all of your current and past client work.

Take a minute to evaluate where you fall on the treat scale.