Dustin Britt was working at his desk last Halloween when a huge explosion outside his window shook the building. The lights went out, and one of his co-workers screamed, "Oh, my God, I think we're going to die!"
But no one in the office was injured. The explosion had been caused by a car crashing into a telephone pole. Matchstic, the Atlanta design firm where Britt is a project manager, did lose power for more than a day. But it was prepared.
Matchstic's computers either were laptops or had backup power supplies, which allowed them to be powered down without the loss of any work. And the company's servers are backed up once a day.
Employees worked from home until power was restored, and a presentation had to be held in a nearby coffee shop, but otherwise the company was unaffected.
Other companies haven't been so lucky. No one comes to work expecting an IT crisis, but heart-stopping technical meltdowns happen every day -- important files get wiped out, or thieves get hold of sensitive data.
And data disasters of all sorts hit especially hard at small and midsize companies, where file backups, data security, and sometimes even basic protections like antivirus software frequently get overlooked in the scramble to make payroll and meet project deadlines.
We've put together a guide to help you handle and possibly prevent four of the most common IT catastrophes.
Text: Michael Fitzgerald, Inc.com
Image: Gargi Raina, a scientist, works on a computer connected to an Optical Profiling System microscope at a nanotechnology laboratory at the Jawaharlal Nehru Center for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), in Bangalore | Photograph: Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP/Getty Images
Also view: The biggest tech disasters (and how to avoid them)
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