Contingency Planning for home use

This week's chapter is dealing with the fundamentals of contingency planning and it reminded me of a phone call I got from my younger brother about a computer problem he was experiencing recently. Most home users would not likely have any kind of contingency plan in place or even considered until it is too late as in my brother's case.

You see, he said he started to develop intermittent problems with shutting down his computer and the only way to shut it down was to do a hard shut off. It is hard to determine what the problem could have been when just talking with him on the telephone, but it could have been due to a virus, power issues, motherboard or CPU just gave up, etc.

What made him call me was because his college homework that was due in two days was still on his hard drive and he had no way of retrieving it. He did not want to hear the lecture of having a removable backup of important files when your computer is considered fairly old or other factors that could render his computer unusable.

Now coming up with a plan to mitigate some of the risks that you are exposed to in a home environment isn't that difficult. First, he should have identified possible incidents he would be susceptible to in his environment. He did say that the house he is renting did not have grounded power for starters.

This could have contributed to his system failing and may have been prevented if he ran his computer off of an uninterruptible power supply which regulated the power that the computer was using. This wouldn't help with his data access issue. Important files should be backed up on an external drive at the very least. He still would have his files even though the computer died. Another alternative would have been for him to email the files to himself or even upload them to a free online storage service.

He, like so many regular users, never even considered something like this would happen to him. It is a hard lesson to learn, but having a contingency plan even at home is a necessity depending on what you store on your computer.