What would happen if tomorrow when you arrive at work the computers are not there, or you cannot get into the building, or your IT guy pops his head into our office, pale faced, and tells you something about the server's hard drive not working? Do you think it can't happen to you? Then stop reading now.

Still reading? This article is not about doing backups, that is a job for technical people; this is an article for CEOs and others in small business and non-profits who need to know that their organisations will still function if disaster occurs. It is actually pretty easy to find out whether or not you are covered. I cannot guarantee you are covered if you ask the following questions but you will certainly be good shape, however, if you can't get a firm answer to the questions you are in big trouble and need to take action. I will make recommendations as I go to help with your next steps, but sorry I don't do consultancy!

Without further ado here are the questions, as a boss I know you don't have much time!

Question one: Do we have backups?

Was the answer yes? Ask to see them: backups are physical things: tapes, disks, USB keys - all physical things. If you can't see them you have to assume they don't exist.

Was the answer no? Go to the end of the article, you are at risk and need to act to get some backups.

Question two: How often do we do them?

Was the answer 'once a day'? This is a pretty good answer, unless you have a lot of transactions going through your computers and you could not afford to loose today's information. If you are not sure, ask your heads of department/business units what impact loosing today's information would have on the business? You might need transaction based backups, and this is possible, in reality most small business could cope with loosing half a days information.

Was the answer 'one a week'? Ask you head of department/business units what the effect of loosing a weeks information would be for the organisation. It is pretty likely that this would mean several days of lost business as documents, emails, invoices, financial transactions are reprocessed. Maybe not the end of the world, but it will effect your organisation, ask yourself: can the organisation afford this risk? It is very likely backups will cost less than the days lost duplicating effort

Was the answer 'one a month'? A month is a long time for an organisation, can you afford to replay the last months activity? Even if you try, your staff will not be able to recreate what is lost: Invoices will not be reissued, fundraising leads will be forgotten, calenders will not be correct, no matter how much effort your staff make to put things right, maybe they will get 60% right. Is it worth the risk? One thing is certain, your organisation's reputation will suffer, partners will loose confidence in your ability to act professionally, funders will start thinking very carefully before investing.

Question three: What do they cover?

Was the answer 'everything'? Great, then move on to the next question, don't worry, if this answer was not correct, you will know after you have asked all the questions!

Was the answer roughly 'all data/information but not software'? OK, it's a start. It is quite normal for IT people to backup data regularly, this saves time to do backups. However, you must now ask another question:

Question three part 2: Do you have copies all the software and licences?

Was the answer yes: Great, that's all you need to hear

Was the answer no: When you make the killer request at the end of this article you will find probably be disappointed. Without software and licences, your IT people will take a long time to make things work and will probably find themselves on the phone to Microsoft and Sage for at least a day.

Question four: Where are the backups kept?

Was the answer 'at Joe's house', or 'in organisations x's safe'? This is great and exactly what you need to hear, if your offices collapse tomorrow at least your data still exists!

Was the answer 'in the safe', 'in the cupboard', 'on Joe's computer'? Keeping copies of backups out of the building is essential for recovery should a disaster occur, your offices might be burgled, quite often burglars vandalise things, and this might destroy your backups in the cupboard.

Question five: How quickly could we recover?

Was the answer 'a day'? This is pretty normal, and your organisation should be able to cope with this scenario

Was the answer 'up to a week'? What would happen to your organisation for a week? Could you function? Ask your head of departments/business units what the impact would be. Very likely it would impact sales and finance most severely. Also, you can expect the news to reach funders and other organisations you work with, and whilst everyone understands that disasters happens, the longer it takes for your organisation to be back up and running, the more undermined confidence in your organisation will be.

Was the answer longer ? This is unacceptable and this time needs to be reduced. The longer it takes for your organisation to be back up and running, the more undermined confidence in your organisation will be. For some organisations a delay of over a week could put its future at jeopardy.

Finally, the killer request: Please restore yesterday's/last week's backups at an off-site location tomorrow This is the ultimate test, and I guarantee you will get resistance to doing this unless you have the most confident IT team. I can almost guarantee your IT team has not done this. Even if they say that they have, make them do it again. They are likely to protest strongly about wasting time they could be spending doing other things, but if you have not done this, you should not be able to sleep well, because it is the equivalent in computer terms of never performing a fire drill. Except that you not able to operate a business without conducting fire drills, it's the law. Unfortunately there is no law that makes organisations test backups. This is a tough ask, and you will need the following for your IT team:

Space to set things up: This space must be physically separate from your organisation, in a real disaster it is likely you would not have access to the office. Just hire a room for a couple of days

Computers: These can be hired, get IT to do this

After you have revived your IT team with smelling salts (you should expect them to be very shocked after they stop protesting!), organise things as follows:

Step 1: Fetch the backups Ask IT to immediately fetch the backup media and software and licences (if they have them) and then take possession of the items and keep them safe yourself

Step 2: Hire the space Hire the temporary office space (with Internet access)

Step 3: Hire equipment Ask IT to hire the equipment

Step 4: Final ask Ask IT if they have everything else they need, possibly they might need to buy software if they do not have the disks. Don't do this, make them list what they need and then have somebody else retrieve them from the IT cupboard or safe, where-ever they might be. Pass back to IT the backup media you asked them for back in step 1.

Step 5: Get going Give IT a coffee and pizza budget (which should cheer them up a bit) and send them off to the hired space to get started

Step 6: Test out the results Assuming that IT can manage to get things going, the next step is to have real users test everything. Organise with your department heads to test using their critical software. Finance should test Sage, or whatever package they use; marketing/fundraising should access and use the prospect database; can you yourself access your email?

Conclusion

If all of the recovery process worked, you are in really good shape. Otherwise, it should be pretty clear what went wrong, ask that the problems be addresses and then try again if you did not reach step 6. Make sure that whatever issues caused the delays are addressed, if missing software slowed things down, make sure copies of software is kept off-site. If your IT team still can't get through all of the recovery steps, you seriously need to consider asking for external help from an expert IT consultancy. But remember that even expert solutions need testing.

Maybe you have read through this and now think it is all too much hassle, it is pretty unlikely, well here is a true story: in 1999 whilst in my first software engineer role, burglars broke into our London offices during the weekend and stole our server computers, they decided they were a bit heavy it seemed whilst escaping and threw them in the nearly Grand Union canal. The company's IT administrator took over a week to recover our data from his backup tapes, which were in the office, only to discover that he only had 70% of the data. In the end we coped but it meant a duplicating of work, none of which was going to make us money, guess what happened to that administrator...

Don't let things get complicated and don't stand for excuses, your organisation might depend on it.