OK, it's time to get personal here and confess that my friends don't listen to my advice about using secure offsite backup for data protection. In fact, they probably don't listen to any of my advice, but that's a whole other story. But now that one of them has experienced a catastrophic data loss, their eyes aren't glazing over before I even get the words "secure offsite backup" out of my mouth. I'm so sorry for my friend that I don't even have the heart to say, "I told you so."

Here's what happened. The friend, who owns a professional photography studio, recently lost 3 years' worth of digital photos when his hard drive crashed. Now, we're talking about a guy with a nice following of clients and thousands of photos -- senior portraits, wedding and engagement photos, baby pictures -- I think you get the idea. He was always too busy to deal with data protection (so he said), and had never researched the option of using secure offsite backup. His data backup practices were spotty, at best. Actually, he was very lucky this time, because he had already processed all the files from the wedding he just shot, and had sent them to the lab for printing. His reputation is still intact, but that's a pretty close call, don't you think? And he won't be able to fill requests for reprints from any of the files he lost

Not many of us have much experience when it comes to developing a business continuity plan and disaster recovery plan, and until recent years we haven't really felt the need to worry about either one. After all, we weren't always responsible for so much data, were we? But events such as the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, as well as natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, have changed our definition of worst case scenario, and have increased our awareness that a complete, interdisciplinary business continuity plan and disaster recovery plan are absolutely critical to the survival of our businesses.

So, what are a business continuity plan and disaster recovery plan? Simply put, they are plans that spell out how your business will function in the event of a disaster, whether onsite or regional in scope. Although we usually think of disasters as weather events, earthquakes, fires, or terrorist activities, they may also (and most frequently do) include things such as equipment failures, security breaches, and attacks by hackers.

And while a solid business continuity plan and disaster recovery plan most certainly include details on how to contact employees, ways to acquire supplies, or where a secondary work site will be located, most businesses are so data-intensive these days that you can’t introduce a complete business continuity and disaster recovery plan if you have neglected critical tasks like data backup and recovery.