Blog – The Architect’s Log

Office After Lightning Struck Roof

A natural disaster is something so far removed from our minds due to the fact that they simply seem to happen – someplace else. One evening while house-sitting at a friend’s home (Washington DC), Netdrafter’s President, Rachel Pastirik was busy working when – believe it or not – a bolt of lightning zapped the roof. The lightning sent positively charged static electricity throughout the house that toasted all the appliances, burnt mirrors, and shot light sockets right out of the wall. Wow!

Netdrafter, a mid-size web development firm located in Sterling, Virginia, has been in business since 1998. At that one lucky moment Rachel’s computers were saved by an advanced battery backup and surge protection system.

Why should this interest you? Let’s look at this another way – have you ever lost your cell phone? What about your contacts in Outlook or a document you just spent hours creating? Now imagine if all the data stored on your company’s computers (accounting records, proposals, contracts, graphic files, contacts, etc.) were erased by lighting, flooding, or any other natural (or unnatural) disaster. Talk about a nightmare! In the old days files were backed up with diskettes or tape drives and the restoration process would take (many) hours and lots of people power.

Today’s savvy technical dynamos are actively creating end user solutions that simplify and reduce personal and/or business risk and vulnerability. You simply don’t need external hard drives, or disks, or staff that swallow time while performing backup maintenance.

Netdrafter continually seeks solutions that provide total and complete care for its customers as well as its own company data. Recently, MozyPro, a Utah based online backup solution company, featured Netdrafter on their web site www.mozypro.com. Why? Because after many, many hours of searching for a customer centric solution, Rachel Pastirik selected MozyPro as Netdrafter’s online backup solution source. MozyPro encrypts and backs up files by making a copy of the files that sit on your machine — including emails — on its own servers for safekeeping. That means that a tornado could airlift your business all the way to Kansas (with your version of Toto) and your files would be safe, snug, and remotely accessible from anywhere in the world – when the dust settles.

If Netdrafter had lost its company and customer data files that day– it would have taken at least 3 months to sort out and recover lost files. That’s a major toothache just waiting to happen.

Here are some helpful clues to consider – while speculating if this article is really relevant to you. Do you own or store intellectual property data, marketing information, graphic files (designs, photos, videos), account/accounting data, forms, agreements, a history of important email transactions, and/or just plain old documents?

If you answered yes to any of the questions, then Netdrafter recommends that you use a modern solution for backing up files – online storage and get closer to being paperless.

Also See: How Netdrafter Protects Data

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