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What's your backup plan? The data stored in your office computers is the lifeblood of your firm. With sound strategies for backing up your electronic information, you can survive catastrophic data loss and live to practice another day.

Article Excerpt
Imagine, if you will, these scenarios:

* You come into your law office one day and find that every computer, including your trusty file server, has been infected by fiber-Virus 3000. The master boot record is lost and the hard drives have been wiped clean. Everything is dead. What do you do?

* Entering the office early one morning, you discover that an Evil Hacker Person remotely accessed your computer, deleted all your important data, and changed your screensaver to scrolling text that says: "pwnt by 133th@xXx0rkr3VV3!!1!1!!one." After asking your kids to translate the screen for you, you realize you've been had. What do you do?

* Late one night, the smoke alarms in your office malfunction. This causes your building's fire-suppression system to soak your entire office in two inches of water. The good news is that all your paper client files were protected in waterproof cabinets; the bad news is that all your computers were running and were damaged beyond repair. What do you do?

The answers to these questions are based almost entirely on your current strategies for backing up your data (and also for keeping your antivirus software up-to-date and firewalls running). Smart attorneys will pull out a few back-up disks, take a few hours to reinstall their data in a new computer, and be on their way. Not-so-smart attorneys will probably be curled up in a fetal position for several hours while they try to figure out how to recover from losing several years' worth of data.

Although most large firms enjoy the luxury of information technology departments to handle data backup for them, many small firms have deficient or nonexistent backup strategies. Some lawyers simply don't understand the need, while others lack technical computer skills and decide (without actually investigating) that data backups are simply too complicated for them to handle.

But you don't have to be a Bill Gates or Linus Torvalds to know how to back up computer data. All you really need is a basic understanding of your computer's directory structure, which you probably already know a little about.

If you don't know what a directory structure is, click on your computer's "Start" menu, and select "My Computer." There should be an icon marked "C:," or possibly "Local Drive." That's your computer's hard drive. Clicking on it will show you the folders found on this drive.

You're now located at "C:\." Double-click (or single-click, depending on your system configuration) on the folder called "Program Files." Now you're at "C:\Program Files." Congratulations, you've just learned what your computer's directory structure looks like, and you'll know how to find something located at "C:\Documents and Settings" or "C:\Temp\Random\."

This is a good time to think about where and how your client-related documents are stored. It's much harder to back up your documents if they're located in 15 different unrelated directories on your computer. If you have one computer, move all your client files into a single directory, which for Windows users is probably located in "My Documents."

If you have a server that links multiple computers, store everything in one directory on the server. It's much easier to backup one directory (and all of its sub directories) than to back up...

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