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When Jeanne Reyer left for vacation in May 2007 she had no idea the disaster to which she would return. As Executive Director of Captain Hope’s Kids, a charitable organization meeting the critical needs of homeless children, she depends heavily on volunteer support and donations. And her office and administrative support, including technology support and infrastructure, runs at a bare minimum so every penny possible can go toward the organization’s mission of helping homeless children.
One morning while Reyer was away on vacation, her Development Director, Jada Simpson, arrived at the office to the unmistakable squealing noise that accompanies a server meltdown and inevitable loss of data.
The organization had just received new computers but they had not yet been networked appropriately and the data on them was not being backed up. To make matters worse, their two servers were supposed to be mirroring data as an additional backup measure, and that was not happening.
Recognizing that she could not do anything about the issue, CHK’s board president, Carey McMann, didn’t tell Reyer the extent of the data loss until she returned from her respite. In the end, Captain Hope’s Kids lost an entire year’s worth of data. Reyer says that operations essentially stopped for two weeks while they attempted to salvage their data. However, very little useful information was recovered. Data recovery services were donated, in addition to countless volunteer hours donated to help recreate data files. Reyer has not yet calculated the total costs but estimates it will be in the thousands of dollars --- and she says they are still feeling the effects of their data disaster.
“I have learned the hard way about properly backing up and protecting our digital information and files at Captain Hope’s Kids,” said Reyer. “I hope other nonprofits can learn from our experiences so they don’t have to go through the same thing.”
Unfortunately, the mishap at Captain Hope’s Kids is not that uncommon for small and mid-sized organizations and businesses; with little technology support and infrastructure, they often rely on only server and/or tape backups --- or no backups at all. Consider the following statistics:
- 31% of PC users have lost all of their files due to events beyond their control.
- 34% of companies fail to test their tape backups, and of those that do, 77% have found tape back-up failures.
- 60% of companies that lose their data will shut down within 6 months of the disaster.
- 93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. 50% of businesses that found themselves without data management for this same time period filed for bankruptcy immediately.
Do you backup your data on a daily basis? If so, are you still relying on servers, backup tapes or external hard drives?
Today there is a failsafe way to protect all your important digital files, including Word documents, spreadsheets, accounting and contact applications, video, music and more, with online document backup and management services such as DocuSync Corporation. When you backup your data via the Internet to your DocuSync account, our data encryption, firewall and mirroring technologies backup and protect your data, protecting it from software or hardware failures and other disasters.
And that’s not all. With DocuSync, you can access your data anytime from anywhere you have an Internet connection, you can share your files and folders and collaborate on documents, plus so much more.
DocuSync Corporation learned about CHK’s disaster through one of its volunteers and has donated its services to the organization for the next year.
“Captain Hope’s Kids is so thankful for the donated help of DocuSync and its employees – they have been a lifesaver,” said Reyer. “As our mission is to serve the critical needs of homeless children, it’s crucial that our organization has the necessary support and tools to help the most vulnerable in our community.”
In addition to the failsafe data backup and recovery functions that CHK now relies upon, sharing files with its paid and volunteer staff has become almost instantaneous with DocuSync’s file sharing capabilities. Previously, physical transfers of accounting data were taking place with drives across town and manual pick ups needing to be coordinated.
We will follow CHK’s migration to DocuSync as its data backup, recovery, access, and sharing service over the next year. Stay tuned for updates…
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