Water and electricity don’t mix. All of your technology runs off of power. If flooding happens quickly abandon your powered equipment. It can be replaced you can’t. I actually had someone call be once saying their computer room had flooded and that thy were standing in three inches of water holding up a server. They wanted to know what they needed to do. “Get of the room before you die!” We were able to save all of the equipment even though it got wet. We wouldn’t have been able to save the person is they got electrocuted.
If you are worried about flooding but it hasn’t happened yet you can take several steps to protect your technology.
Move it to higher ground. Get computers off of the floor and on top of desks.
Unplug it. This greatly reduces the likelihood of damage.
Turn it off. Not as effective as unplugging but still a risk reducer.
If your equipment has gotten wet DO NOT turn it back on. Once power has been applied it can cause a damaging short if water is present. Contact BloughTech to allow us to safely remove the water before turning back on.
Backups
Double check that you have current backups of all your critical data.
Make sure you have a backup offsite.
Make sure you have multiple backups. Don’t just rely on one. BloughTech recommends that you always keep critical data in three separate locations. Generally, these are on site on your server, onsite on a backup device and offsite in cloud storage.
If you have important data that is NOT on your server but instead is on some other device such as a local PC or a thumb drive – DO NOT assume that BloughTech has backed that up. We backup and monitor data on your server, but do not backup data on other devices unless we are specifically asked to. Our recommendation is to ALWAYS keep critical data on your server or to use our free DATTODRIVE solution that allows you to synchronize your locally saved data automatically to a cloud server. DATTODRIVE is new, if you haven’t heard of it yet just ask.
Power Issues
Make sure all critical equipment is on a surge protector to protect against voltage spikes which can damage electronics.
We strongly recommend putting critical equipment, including PC’s, on battery backups. This is NOT to allow for operation during a power outage, but instead to allow you time to safely shutdown your computer and to protect against brown outs (when the lights dim) which can be as damaging as a voltage spike.
If you are particularly concerned you can unplug your power and network cables to isolate your computer from surges.
