Disaster Recovery for Home/Small Business Computing

Unforeseen Disasters: It's Not the Teeth It's the Slobber

    We will be giving a talk at the Kinnelon Library on October 30, 2019 from 7 PM

    to around 8:150 PM to discuss Quick Disaster Recovery in Win 10 with OS and 

    3rd party tools - here is the outline:

   

  What is a Disaster Recovery Plan?     

   It's Insurance Against the Loss of Data, Time & Money

   It's Being Able to Replace Your Hardware and Your Software Quickly

   It's Getting Working Again ASAP

   And it Includes:

•Backing Up -- Casper 10 Image Backup / Windows Backup (Control Panel)

•Making a Recovery Disk (Flash Drive)

•Having Your Product Key (License)

•Making Sure Your Data is Protected from Corruption or Attack

•Storing Critical Files Offsite – If Need Be  🤷‍♂️

•Having a Plan to Get Up and Running Quickly -- What Will You Do?

•Protecting from Most Likely Failures Absolutely – Best Guessing the Rest

•Having Quick Access to Correct Replacement Hardware

•Knowing How to Quickly Transfer Programs and Data to New and Different Hardware

•Knowing that Your Plan Works – By … Testing It! As Much As You Can

When Do You Need the Plan?

Think of all the things that can go wrong with your equipment or software!

Fire, flood, failed hardware, corrupted data, stupid stuff, lost or stolen equipment -- 

Essentially you need to be able to replace or fix any part of your hardware or software

as quickly as you can.

What Stuff Do You Need?

You should have a recent bootable disk image backup of your Boot Drive - there are a

 number of reputable suppliers of disk imaging software -- I like Casper 10 from Future

Future Systems Development, which is about $60, and worth every penny. You will also

need an external drive to backup to. It can also make virtual, bootable drives as files

or copies of any other recognized drive.

You need at least a 32 GB Flash Drive.

Don't have your product key? You need Magic Jelly Bean Keyfinder! It's free.

You need decent security software. I like Windows Defender which you already own

if you have Win 10. You do not need for-pay basic coverage. I also like Malwarebytes

which you can try for 2 weeks at no charge. Malwarebytes works well with other

security software and does not disable it, as some conventional software does.

You can store critical files online with OneDrive to protect them from local issues.

OneDrive can be weird though, so don't always expect it to be available. Smile!

Answer the question! If anything breaks, or your OS is compromised, what will you do?

So if you end up with a new computer, how will you replicate your previous program installs,

your data, your cookies/web pages, browser history, and so on? An archival file backup won't

do it. And you can't boot your new machine to your old system's drive! You will need

another piece of commercial software: PC Mover from LapLink which costs about $60.

Luckily you don't need it 'til you do, and you can download it to a flash drive and

install it on your new machine. Then you get to transfer all of your files, apps, and

settings to the new PC. From your Casper Image Backup! It works!

As usual, we will take questions and deal with issues at the end of the talk.

See you there!

~Ted