At no point is
a plan more important than in the face of disaster. Having a plan to
address the critical issues will make the difference between success and
failure. All computers fail, it's just a matter of when. Many of our
clients have experienced significant failure without loss of data because
they were prepared.
Each year on the anniversary of the Chernobyl
nuclear meltdown, a virus, known usually as CIH, detonates. It begins by
destroying the most critical areas of your hard disk, and continues by
writing random data to the remainder. It can sometimes be corrected, but
the fixes generally do not work on the most recent configurations of
disks.
Our client was unprepared for the virus
when it hit. Most users had disabled the installed virus protection
because it was inconvenient when it wanted to scan the computer each
week. However, in setting up their network, we ensured that all data was
stored on their main server, and backup up nightly. Additionally, the
server was locked from users so they were unable to run programs on it
directly. These decisions were made with some resistance from the
client. The server was seen as a waste of money, because no one was able
to work on it.
In total, we reinstalled
12 workstations that were completely wiped out, but no data was lost
because the server was secure. They were running as normal by the start
of the next business day.
