With out-of-control flooding across parts of Iowa, lots of small businesses are finding themselves putting disaster recovery measures into action. The result is a sobering dose of reality that has shown many companies where their planning really prepared them, and where it really didn’t. “When you make [disaster recovery] plans, you never think it could possibly happen to you,” Wade Arnold, CEO of T8 Design, told Computerworld.com. “Going through this experience is going to make me look at those plans as something other than just an IT checklist.”

That’s the way it often is with things like disaster recovery planning; it’s hard to get the details right until you’ve been through a disaster and seen your plans break down. But luckily, you can still learn a lot from the experience of others. Here we’ve collected a short list of some often over looked disaster recovery tips and strategies.

1. Count on Staff Shortages – Arnold of T8Design told Computerworld that his company is already changing their disaster recovery plan to account for staff missing work to deal with family emergencies and community volunteer efforts. For different reasons, companies in Atlanta dealt with an absentee workforce when a tornado hit downtown in early spring, making the streets unnavigable even for employees whose businesses hadn’t been damaged. After a disaster, lots of employees are going to have other things besides work on their minds, and some may never return to the job.
2. Remember the Small Stuff - So you’ve got all your backup hardware ready to be brought online in a disaster. But do you have the license keys for the software? What about extra mice and keyboards? Richard Wright, HP recovery operations manager suggests that you have a notebook with all the contact information for your vendors , to make software activation a breeze. And of course plenty of those easy to forget peripheral essentials.
3. Don’t Tie Anything to One Person - If you disaster recovery plan hinges on the actions of one person, and that one person is cut off from the company by injury, environmental conditions or anything else, then your company is in big trouble. Make sure that you have back-up personnel accounted for, not just back-up servers.
4. Prepare For the Worst - No one expected that Cedar River would swell past 500-year flood levels. Luckily for Arnold though, his company considered the possibility anyways and planned accordingly. Their main data center is located 5 miles outside of downtown Cedar Falls, and they have an additional failover site in Chicago if the local center goes down. So far the result is that they’ve seen no service outages. In a Computerworld article from earlier this month, HP offers some good advice on making plans for huge, entirely unexpected, large-scale disasters.
5. Concentrate on The Likely - Taking into account low probability,high cost disasters is definitely important. But you need to make sure to concentrate resources on the high probability disasters first. Worry about a wreck taking out your power connection before you worry about the effects of a terrorist attack.
6. Make Sure Everyone’s In The Know – Make sure all of your employees understand the recovery plan. And most importantly make sure they understand the logic behind the plan. In the event of a disaster, its going to be awfully difficult to simply follow a script. Unanticipated situations will require that staff members make some quick, creative decisions on the fly. Unless they understand the “why” behind your recovery plan, there’s no guarantee that they’ll make good long-term decisions.
7. Keep it Flexible – Going off the last point, a simple script is not going to cut it. There’s too much uncertainty in any disaster to anticipate every scenario and plan out a response. Make sure that your plan is flexible enough to cope with the on-the-spot modifications it will inevitably undergo

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