Make a disaster recovery plan and test it on a regular basis: To enhance the performance of the storage device, create a good recovery plan so that you know you are able to retrieve data in a minimal amount of time when required. Test the recovery system regularly and verify that you have retrieved your complete data pool.
We hold emergency drills in school, and families are encouraged to develop meeting places and other plans in case of natural disasters, but we don’t think about the far more common disasters, such as those joyous moments when technology fails and work is lost. For home use, people may save their photos on an external hard drive as well as in the cloud, so in case their computer crashes, there are two back-up plans in place that are only as good as the last time you backed up your files, but that will be enough for most people, and they know they can access their data quickly enough for personal use.
If you are working in an active, creative environment and you are generating large amounts of data that many hands must access daily, you’re in a different ballpark altogether. Data protection/recovery is often something that is handled for you. With redundancy and a maintenance plan, your engineer can test that everything would transfer to the backups in milliseconds, but as the end user, you wouldn’t notice anything, so to you there was never anything wrong in the first place. There is a Plan A, B and C, the system does it automatically, and the only plan you have to worry about is the one where you get coffee and sit down to start your day.
We should have drills. I already get coffee every morning so this should be easy…