Posted by: Robert Markette
March 02, 2006

My posts have been rather sporadic lately due to my recent vacation (and recovery from the vacation) and my most recent disaster – coffee spilled on my computer keyboard.  Spilling coffee on a keyboard is usually a problem, however, if your computer is a laptop, spilling coffee on the keyboard can be fatal.  My recent experience in this area provides another reminder that it is important to backup your hard drive regularly for many reasons, beyond the HIPAA Security Rule.

Now, many of you will immediately think, Bob, you constantly remind us of the importance of backing up our hard drives.  Surely, you regularly back up your own hard drive.  I must confess that, although I do backup the documents and photos on my hard drive, I do not do this as often as I should.

In this case, I performed a backup of all the important files (read documents and photos) on my hard drive right before I went on vacation.  (I get a little paranoid about losing my laptop or having something bad happen to it when I travel.)  While on vacation, there was nothing work related added to my hard drive, however I did load 200 or more pictures from my digital camera onto the hard drive.

Upon my return from Hawaii I did not immediately backup my hard drive (read vacation photos).  In fact, I neglected to perform a backup at all last week.  Which leads me to this past Monday, I managed to spill some coffee on my keyboard.  Now for most computers, coffee on the keyboard is a minor inconvenience, for a laptop, it is a major problem, because the keyboard is on top of the computer.

While I was mopping up coffee, the computer stopped (and made a few unhappy noises.)  When the computer locked up, I realized that I had neither backed up any of the vacation pictures nor had I backed up the documents I had been working on the week before.  Luckily, my major project for the previous week was already on its way to the client.  Nevertheless, my laptop was dead and all of the documents I was working on as well as my vacation pictures were at least going to be difficult to access.

If I had performed a backup on my regular schedule, I would not have lost a great deal of time at work.  I would have been able to restore my information to one of our spare computers and been up and running in an hour so.   Because I had to take the computer somewhere learn that it was most likely dead and have them recover the data from my hard drive, I lost more time than necessary.  In this case, no information was lost, but the lack of a backup illustrated another reason for having them, you can get back to work more quickly with one than without. 

My accident illustrates a number of points.  First, you may need your backup for reasons other than hard drive failure.  Second, you should be sure to evaluate your backup schedule and determine not only could you function without certain items, but if you could function without them, how much productive time at work would be lost by having to start them over. 

The photos, although personal, illustrate another point, if you are in the midst of a major project, say a proposal for grant funding, you may wish to not only save regularly while you are drafting, but make a duplicate copy of that special file.  This may not be a formal backup procedure that is performed regularly, but an additional step taken, because if you were to have an incident that caused you to lose the project, you will very likely have lost a great deal of time.

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