Detailed Notes
In the latest episode of the Building Better Developers podcast, hosts Rob Broadhead and Michael Meloche discuss a critical topic that many businesses overlook until it's too late—a disaster recovery plan. When disaster strikes, whether it’s a cyberattack, hardware failure, or natural calamity, how well you recover can determine whether your business survives or collapses.
Read more: https://develpreneur.com/disaster-recovery-plan-protecting-your-business-from-unexpected-threats/
*The Challenge: Develop and Test Your Disaster Recovery Plan*
As part of the podcast’s interactive approach, Rob and Michael challenge listeners to take action:
Create a Disaster Recovery Plan – If you don’t have one, start by outlining what data and systems are essential, where they are stored, and how you would recover them in case of failure.
Test Your Disaster Recovery Plan – Simulate a scenario where your primary system fails. Try accessing critical files from a backup and see how quickly your business can resume operations.
Stay tuned for the next episode of Building Better Developers, where the conversation continues with a deep dive into business continuity planning. In the meantime, share your disaster recovery experiences and strategies with the hosts at [email protected] or connect through the Developer website.
Don’t wait for disaster to strike—start planning your disaster recovery plan today!
Additional Resources
* System Backups – Prepare for the Worst (https://develpreneur.com/system-backups-prepare-for-the-worst/) * When Coffee Hits the Fan: Developer Disaster Recovery (https://develpreneur.com/when-coffee-hits-the-fan-developer-disaster-recovery/) * Testing Your Backups – Disaster Recovery Requires Verification (https://develpreneur.com/testing-your-backups-disaster-recovery-requires-verification/)
*Follow-us on:*
* https://develpreneur.com/ * https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZOuFN_LhczvGyT2KSItH_g/featured * https://facebook.com/Develpreneur * https://twitter.com/develpreneur * http://linkedin.com/develpreneur
Transcript Text
[Music] and we we are live or recording at any rate um let's see try with the lights that'll work do we have topics did we have like a spell over no well not I'm aware of but I threw some topics out there that kind of follow what we talked about and kind of fit with what's going on today with all this extreme weather we're getting it made me think about it and what's going on in your life uh so so like one of them was Disaster Recovery you know keeping your business up during extreme weather or you know fire whatever and then the second one was uh you know how to keep your business going when life happens like if you're in the middle of a immediate move or you know a baby or something along those lines business I like disaster recovery and business continuity I like those too because I don't think people think about them enough so and it kind of flows because the last two we did business growth strategies and work life balance strategies so I don't know if you want to do the uh when life happens first and then Disaster Recovery or vice versa I mean they both kind of work yeah I think we'll start with this I think we'll just go right with the first we'll do disaster recovery and then right into uh business continuity because I think both of those are topics that people don't think about enough and um because it is yeah I think there's a there's a lot going on there and it's it actually does link back to a lot of stuff that we've discussed if I can go back and find where where did I put my there my zoom window okay yeah for those of you watching the pre-show it's early for us we're just getting our coffee or tea yep so you're still drinking tea though right yep uh the only time I went to Coffee was when I was in Nolensville um couple week weeks ago for the CPA cuz they didn't really have good tea options so I just had plain coffee that day it's fun it's just funny that you use C because I do that all the time and I'll be chided sometimes for it where it's like you don't drink coffee like well I say coffee because everybody relates and if I say tea it like throws them off unless I want it to be like a Icebreaker because like oh tea who drinks tea like I do and then I can go into my you know my history of teas and how I have you know decided which ones I like and which ones I don't and how I all my little tea rituals and stuff like that so anyway so I think we've got a topic so good thing bad I got all kinds of one in the same so I think we'll be able to Dive Right into those so we're going to do Disaster Recovery first okay my audio still good oh yeah yeah I'm not hearing any background it's really getting bad here so I just want to make sure it's not bleeding through yeah just before we start yeah that was like yesterday we had guy across the street was like he's put in a pool now he's tearing up his driveway and it was like I was like how long can you have that little beep beep beep of backing up it was like for 10 minutes straight and it was right when I was on a call and it was with guys that had like strong accents and all of them it's all guys and I've got like strong accents and deep voices and they're soft not like super soft talkers but not real loud and then it's over zoom and it's mics and all this and then I've got this beeping and I'm just like ah I was hurting by the end of it just trying to like concentrate and hear what was being said and the sad thing was I had a window open and after like I was I don't know how far into it where I was like I'm just struggling to hear and I was like oh it sort of registered that like there's all this noise going on there's a window open so I shut the window it helped a little but it's just like the cool thing was you know we had that going and you know when I'm listening to other people it doesn't come through on the mic so it's like it's miserable here but you know unless like I think the only thing I've ever had come through the mic was when a like a fire truck or ambulance or something went right out the front door and I had the windows open wow all right sorry that's my fa I'm sidetracking too much and we'll go back to our little three2 well hello and welcome back we are continuing our season of building better businesses but we are actually building better developers we are the develop andur podcast and this episode when disaster strikes how are you going to recover that's where we're going with this one but first i'm going to introduce myself my name is Rob Broadhead I am one of the founders of developing or building better developers also a founder of RB Consulting where we way before the disaster strike uh sometimes actually the disaster it feels like a disaster because you have this technology sprawl and all of the pain and the sweat Blood Sweat and Tears that went into it and you've got all this nice stuff and you've spent all this money and you've invested in technology or you're thinking about invested in technology and it's just a little too much and we sit down with you and we walk through what is your business do what is your secret sauce what is the special recipe that you have for your customers and then we craft a special recipe of technology for you to serve your customers and your business so that you can go out there and actually do the things you want to do we do this through simplification automation integration even Innovation we may even help you build a custom solution for you that is not going to take you know the billions of dollars that you may think it does and we can get it down to something that's going to work with your budget your time uh and help you grow so that this is going to be something will work for you today tomorrow 6 months from now 10 years from now well maybe not 10 but we're going to get a stretch it as far out as we can good thing bad thing my I have like the quintessential good thing bad thing this week of like I went got a house on the market couple of days later got a cash offer awesome surprisingly like was the whole thing was better than we thought faster than we expected the bad side of that is they want us out in two weeks is we close in two weeks so it is just like just you know busier than a one-legged man in an ass kicking contest as I used to say uh so it is a good and a bad if there ever was one uh but another good thing is that Michael is here with me so we can do yet another episode and he's going to introduce himself hey everyone my name is Michael M I'm one of the co-founders of developer n building better developers this season building better businesses I'm also the founder of Envision QA where through quality assurance testing we come in and walk you through your software sprawl we figure out your problems and from a user's perspective we walk through all your processes all those little nuances that you do with your current software or your current systems and help you identify what it is that you have is it working for you do you need something custom or do you just need to go buy a tool like maybe Microsoft Office or some other type of profiling tool we help you with these things we help make technology work for you not you work for technology good and bad uh good uh getting a lot done it's getting warmer spring is almost heater getting the yard ready for the uh Springtime flowers gardening bad side the pollen is here my allergies are already starting to get bad and my car is starting to turn yellow so uh that's where I'm I'm ready for spring to get here the flowers to come out and be nice and be done it it's like this is that time of year where I am miserable because it's like popping allergy pills every day I know the feeling I'm a Clarian bro I guess in that sense or algra or all of the other zerex and all those I have to cycle through them now let's talk about disasters and more specifically Disaster Recovery this is an area I think we I know even large businesses that I've worked with that their Disaster Recovery plan is is very minimal now it has definitely gotten better in the last I don't know 10 to 20 years particularly um with cloud services and software as a service and some of those things we are more likely to have just offset just sort of push off to somebody else the concerns about Disaster Recovery because now if we've got everything in the cloud we don't have to worry about our data center getting struck and you know or Worse what used to be somebody spills coffee on the server back in the you know in the closet that have we call a server room but and there used to be things like offsite backups and all these things we did that now is sort of just it just sort of comes with software as a service it says comes with cloud services but there still needs to be an intentionality to that and that's what I talk a little bit about in Disaster Recovery now first it is the it is the most basics of these is that you have whether you're you know Windows or Apple or whatever your primary system is whatever your uh main provider what you know if it's Google if you like a you know Google Docs kind of company and you use Google Sheets and all that in Google Drive or whether you use like a maybe like Dropbox for showing a lot of stuff or maybe you use Windows in their uh Windows environment or their Azure environment those kinds of things you still need to make sure because a lot of these will back stuff up to the cloud one you want to make sure that you've got like the right uh level of M membership or subscription or whatever it is to the services so that your stuff can you can put your stuff out there that you need but then you also need to make sure that you're intentional about where you put it so that it does get backed up and and put out on the server on you on the regular basis things like Google Drive Dropbox and Microsoft's um that I just lost the name of it off the top of my head but those Services they start with uh a specific folder basically and the things that are in those folders just just automatically get sucked up and synced and it makes your life a lot easier however you need to make sure you do this that you you take advantage of this that you store stuff on there now a lot of like the nice thing and I'm normally not a huge Windows fan but one of the nice thing about the windows stuff is that it will just your folder your desktop and that it will pull that stuff in by default it will just store that off out on your your one drive and and everything's good uh but you do need to be cognizant about that and what you put there so that you're making sure that stuff gets backed up but also there's a lot of things that we do that are not particularly a part of that that are not our normal documents and so one of the things I think you should consider is on a regular basis and we've talked about that just along the same lines of making sure that you've got your licenses up to date and things like that so make sure that you have a backup of your software of the applications that you use especially these days because a lot of what we get is digital we go down download it we do whatever we need to so we need to make sure that if something happens to that desktop that laptop your phone that if you go to another one you have all of the things in place so you know where to like download the software you use you need you know where to you know how to reconnect to things how do you log in how do you have the right IDs and this is not just you this is for your business so this is where you put things in place you have processes and procedures even if if you're a very small business to say okay this is where we put our business documents this is how we store them this is how often we do backups and I would do them even outside of those software as of services because you never know like Amazon's going to like there have been Amazon's gone down Microsoft's gone down Dropbox have gone down these things have gone down and so you want to be able to access your stuff if you need to now this can be as simple as um having like a nice little thumb drive or an external drive because these USB drives these days are you know it's maybe for a couple hundred bucks you can have like four or five terabytes of data that you can store uh I've got so I've got one that's just uses Microsoft or mic Apple's time machine I just put all the stuff out there so I can I have a backup all the time on this thing and I can take it wherever I want I don't care you know and it's always there with me and I've got all kinds of data on it but you what you want to do is think through what is the worst case to get started on this like what's the worst can happen what you know it it depends on how you work but is if like what if I don't have internet connection what if um my my desktop gets destroyed or my laptop gets destroyed how do I continue serving the business that I need to now we're going to talk a little bit in the next episode more about like business continuity and some things during this but Disaster Recovery is really more about if I were like just maybe it's as simple as if I unplug all of my servers and devices and I plug them back in will they come back up and everything connect as it needs to be and it's things like doing failovers so if I've got a u if somewhere I've got a software as a service or I've got a let's say I've got a database that I use for my business if that site goes down if that location goes down you know if I've got let's say I'm using Dropbox or Amazon Dropbox I they they hide you from a little bit but especially if you're using Amazon or Azure or Google uh cloud and those things they're going to have regions where your servers exist and so what you this is where you think on the bigger side on Disaster Recovery it's like what if the east coast of the US gets wiped out in storms or something like that and it goes down are my servers still going to be valid can I move my business and everything to the West Coast for example now these may seem too rare to take to think through but it only takes one you if it happens once every 5 years but during that five years you have a down period where your business disappears effectively for 5 days what does that do to you it may not be a big thing if you're a side Hustle but as you get further along what does that do to you you know and particularly it's things like this things that I think are most important with these is like what happens to payroll you know what if I can't access does my will payroll still work will my people get paid will I get paid will money flow the the things that are the you know the heart and soul of your business are those going to be able to still recover and move forward even though you know there's been a a nuclear war or a meteor hit or something like that some literally in some cases the act of God kinds of things that go on what happens there and how do I go back and restore where I was and this is actually just one last thing I'm going to throw it to Michael because I've talked too long on this at this point but the other thing is in the the with the extra lens of there are lot of cyber attacks that go on where people get locked out of their systems and so those are probably even more likely than these Act of God things that I've mentioned but they are the same kind of thing it's like what if somebody hacks your system gets a hold of everything how do you go back to a point before you were hacked and re you know restart your business basically and not have to pay whatever Their fines are and I'm going to not make you pay a fine though and throw this over to Michael for a little bit and see what you know what your thoughts are and of these and where what are some of your experiences with Disaster Recovery yeah so we worked at a company years ago uh but before you came on board uh one of the things that first kind of turned me on to Disaster Recovery was the fact that the company server room was destroyed in a fire because the server room was next door to a dry cleaners or to a restaurant that had a kitchen fire and literally wiped out our server room and you know it took them months to recover because their backups weren't anywhere else it was just their uh at that one particular location so the whole idea of Disaster Recovery preparedness is basically to make sure that you have a way to stand up your business again in case something happens and banks have been doing this for years hospitals have been doing this for years pre cloud and a lot of them still do this but what they do is they back up their systems once a day once a week they critical information daily uh larger scale backups weekly monthly it's probably a more aggressive backup and what they do with those is they take those offsite so they actually go put them in lock boxes secure places they can actually handle extreme weather fire flooding so if anything happens to the business they can go offsite take those tapes rebuild the server room or whatever they have to do pop it back in and they've got their data back now they may be down for a couple days but at least they are able to bring things back up now over the years as Rob mentioned we now have cloud services we have better external backups through USB drives external hard drives so we don't have to necessarily rely on the slow tape backups anymore we could even have remote uh hostings so you could go with cloud services or you could even go with off-site storage uh essentially have your own virtual Cloud get your own uh like hire your own service rooms go buy a rack at one offsite uh server and just have your backups go there they're still secure they're not in the cloud and this is especially important for those of you that have uh critical information like pii uh banking information financial information those things you kind of want to keep secure and a lot of cloud services aren't uh Hippa or socks compliant a lot of them are but you have to pay for it so you have options uh these are just some of the things you can do one of the things I like to do is I keep an offshore backup CU I've got two locations and what I also do is locally like Rob mentioned uh he uses uh like time machine backups and backs up his machines to uh external drives I also uh there the external or the home business options for backups have gotten better uh you can actually now buy a personal Nas for about $300 and that gives you up to 10 tab of backup raid uh one where you can have a perfect image and if one of the drives fail you just pop it up take the drive out pop another one in boom you're good to go now I still back that up once a month and I take that offsite but it's right here it's not in the cloud all my stuff's private it's protected now if both places get destroyed I do have some virtual information for critical business infrastructure needs in the cloud in Dropbox so what you want to do is you kind of want to look at what you have and break it out diversify it uh put it in places where it makes sense so critical business information so this was something that I never really thought of but like Rob mention what if the banks go down you know where's your money well this actually happened to me recently where my account got hit for fraud by my own bank doing something with my bank I was buying a service through them to set something up and they locked me out for a week I was panicked because I physically had to go into the location the banker tried to work it through it with me and here I am um two months later almost three months later and I find out it's still not done my account is still got certain lockdowns in it so I'm now looking at how can I disaster recover my bank do I need to diversify my Banks even to have certain critical information at One Bank other financial information at another bank so if one goes down I still have access to money somewhere else so that's just one thing that a lot of people don't think about the other thing and this was actually rather interesting um probably about a decade ago uh my mother had a house fire my mom was self-employed running flea markets all her tax information and personal information went up in the fire all of it was gone we had to go to the accountant and the accountant had to kind of back dat all her notes to put together a tax history so your financial information your uh you know all your files for your business keep keep paper copies but also scan those copies as soon as you get them into some type of cloud environment or digital environment and get those somewhere safe be a lock box at a bank or somewhere else but make sure that you keep those separate uh you can also do that for your home stuff too I recommend that because you know if your Social Security C goes up it's a pain in the ass to get another one so little things like this you don't think about daily but these are things that if it disaster strikes you are going to be in a whole lot of pain trying to get your life back together so decrease that now by being prepared by getting things together that's the whole point of this Disaster Recovery uh and one last thing I'll note is Rob mentioned you know back up those online systems like websites uh you know any Services you have a customer mine just recently had their website hacked and even though they were doing daily backups the backups had exceeded the period from when the site was hacked to the backups so all they had were bad backups so I recommend if you do stand up any type of software be a mobile app be it a website whatever software is perfect for this the moment you go live have a snapshot a backup put it in a container whatever but then store that somewhere else and say do not touch get it off your system get it where no one can touch it and put it where you will always find it so if disaster strikes you can go pull that out plug it in restore your site within hours even minutes and be back online and not have your business be down there's a couple key things there that I think we should people miss out is that you do need to test your Disaster Recovery um what Michael say is a perfect example is that that like periodically you need to make sure that you do have backup so that your backup process is not an issue I may have shared this before but this actually is something that goes Way Way Back is I had a this back when I was in college I would back up my senior project backed it up religiously like I think daily the problem I had was that the drive and this was back in the world of like hard Diss and floppy discs and stuff like that the drive I had was slowly failing so every time it wrote to a disc it was at a slightly different speed a slightly different way that it did it so that was literally not readable by any device within a about a week and so I was sitting there backing all this stuff up and I could always like back it up and I could go look at it and see that oh the files are right there but even on the same machine a week later the the drive that had written it was now moved has like degraded to it couldn't read it anymore either so I had all these backups and I thought I was doing great but I didn't test it often enough I didn't use another device off enough I ended up losing everything we had to the only thing we had was we had actually had hard print out outs of our code and had to from those recode the entire solution and it just happened to be that like it was fortunate that we had that kind of a backup in similar sense there was a couple years ago that there were a whole bunch of companies that were well actually and I can't think of the name of them right oh I think it's parlor was a social site they went out there and they did their thing and they have this great growing community and they were locked into a single vendor they worked with and I'll just throw the names out there you can find them but they worked with Amazon they used Amazon cloud services and they breached the service contract with Amazon something they did breached the service contract and so Amazon shut them down this is a you know I guess at that point multi-million or more maybe hundreds of millions company that now is shut down and they have no access to their stuff their customers have no access to them and this is where not only do you want to test your disaster recovery but you want to make sure that you do this on a regular basis that you have multiple Disaster Recovery sites don't have just one like Michael said is you like you have maybe something local then you have something offsite and you have something even further out now how you do that may be you know there's a cost Effectiveness to it but verify that your that your Disaster Recovery plan works like I said the way that you do this sometimes a lot the big businesses do it if they've got a Data Center and they've got a disaster recovery plan they will test test it by they will go in there and they will just turn turn the switch off on the data center and say okay now what happens does does everything fail over properly all that kind of stuff does it does the business then sort of like spin back up a second later or a minute later or an hour later whatever it is to recover from that disaster and so you need to think about how that could work what that would look like to you and create a test plan and test your Disaster Recovery I would say at least once a year a lot of times like every six months is a is a pretty good way to do it because you want to make sure before it happens that you know how to recover from it that you know how to you know ensure that you haven't lost the things that you've lost and be properly prepared all of this being what it is I'm going to throw out our standard go ahead if you have questions if you have comments if you have suggestions if you have War Stories from disasters that have hit you shoot us an email at info developer.com you can also reach out to us on the developer.com site you can leave us a contact form but before I go any further I'm going to throw it back to Michael for a second I think you have something to add you forgot the challenge did I forget the challenge yes I did but see this is a good example of Disaster Recovery is my brain just like shut down but I have a backup and I just tested it so there you go I could say that that was planned but I would be lying if I did so that is though what the challenge is actually it's a two-parter it is created recovery plan if you don't have one and say what what does it look like what do I do do your backups whatever you need to do and then test it as part of that to complete this challenge to complete this task is test your Disaster Recovery is you know go to for example a lot of times I I'm very much driven by one like my I've got two machines but I've got one particular laptop that I have very often that has been my that is where I go to do all of my business and so the way for me to do it is I just put that laptop away and I go try to like you know I'll have another laptop or I'll sit on desktop or I'll do something to say okay can I do the critical things so I don't have to do that's like really nice because I just put the I pretend the laptop doesn't exist and when I'm done with my Disaster Recovery test wow I pretend that it exists again and it's right there things like that can make it very easy especially as a side hustle kind of business and if as you're growing that is where you want to go as you want to start from this you know from from the very start being able to do this that's just going to allow you to build the processes the procedures and all the steps that will make that work even as your business grows now now we will wrap up because we have challenged you uh you can also leave us uh leave us feedback wherever you get your podcast you can go out to developer.com channel on YouTube if you want to check us out there leave us comments lots of content out there lots of content on the developer Nord site um if you're if you struggle developer our site we are in talks with our amongst ourselves basically of doing some upgrades there it's been around for a while we're going to move do some server changes and such so it also might be down a little bit here and there but I'm trying to get that it's like it's one of those things that you like you know your server is starting to get older and older those squirrels that are running around or the the hamsters running around their wheels are getting a little old a little slow so do a couple updates and things like that and see what we can do to uh to bring it up into at least this century that being said go out there and have yourself a great day a great week and we will talk to you next time Ah that's not how I wanted to do that bonus material you're in a roll today it is like and I'm this is my second cup of tea I'm like and I'm going to on the break I'm going to go get a third cup of tea and maybe that'll like kick some brain cells in I'm on my first but all right bonus stuff so interestingly enough one of the things Rob touched on near the end is you know working on multip multiple devices like laptop desktop and being able to work from like a central code repository or documentation now if you have it set up right you already have disaster recovery but if you don't have it set up right you may have a single point of failure where if your cloud service goes down or if your Hardware goes down your external drive goes down you're out of luck you're dead in the water so one of the best things you can do for Disaster Recovery is take a look at what you're doing you know do you have one machine if you have one machine make sure you've got backups of that hard drive if you're virtual and you have multiple machines communicating with each other uh make sure that they have that they're being backed up and that the uh like cloud service or wherever that's also being backed up or you have a way to get that offline if you need to um especially if you travel because one of the fun things I ran into recently is uh I went to Nashville and I was sitting at a coffee shop and their Wi-Fi went now well all my stuff's in the cloud so how do I work well thankfully I was still able to plug in my phone and use my phone as a Hotpot but these are little things that's a perfect example if you turn your Wi-Fi off can you still work can you access your most critical files do you have a backup of that so it's just an idea to kind of get you thinking about hey am I ready if the lights go out I think that's that's the nice thing about that's like one of the best ways to me is to to look at your Disaster Recovery plan and things like that is do some try remote work um it's it is amazing how many little things that I like for example if you don't have an internet connection I think we've talked about that before there's a lot of uh a lot of the applications and code I use part of like spinning it up is it's going to go reach out to some CDN somewhere and if I don't have that then I don't if I don't have access to it I I don't have access to those files and then things won't run right and they won't work right and I can work around them if I need to but if it was a longer term deal then you know I want to make sure that I've I've protected myself from that so I think that's like if you if you want some ideas on some of the things that could go wrong some of the things that you want to look you know that are potentials is you know go out and try like look up uh remote work or road warrior or you know those kinds of things uh one of the things that's really is just go like take a drive on a weekend and just go out to the middle of nowhere and can you do the work that you need to do and if not then like what are the things that you might need so that you can build those up and make sure that you are properly covered as as far as disaster goes all right now we will wrap this one up we've got some bonus material we we are coming back we are not done with this season yet and uh we will be back with the next episode we're going to talk uh business continuity so we're going to get a little bit different it's uh but in the same vein of stuff so it's going to be a similar kind of Challenge and uh hopefully you will be much better prepared by the time you get past these next couple of uh episodes that being said have yourself a good one and we will talk to you next time [Music]
Transcript Segments
[Music]
and we we are live or recording at any
rate um let's see try with the lights
that'll
work do we have topics did we have like
a spell over no well not I'm aware of
but I threw some topics out there that
kind of follow what we talked about and
kind of fit with what's going on today
with all this extreme weather we're
getting it made me think about
it and what's going on in your life uh
so so like one of them was Disaster
Recovery you know keeping your business
up during extreme weather or you know
fire whatever and then the second one
was uh you know how to keep your
business going when life happens like if
you're in the middle of a immediate move
or you know a baby or something along
those lines business I like disaster
recovery and business
continuity I like those too because I
don't think people think about them
enough so and it kind of flows because
the last two we did business growth
strategies and work life balance
strategies so I don't know if you want
to do the uh when life happens first and
then Disaster Recovery or vice versa I
mean they both kind of work yeah I think
we'll start with this I think we'll just
go right with the first we'll do
disaster recovery and then right into uh
business continuity because I think both
of those are topics that people don't
think about
enough and um because it is yeah
I think there's a there's a lot going on
there and it's it actually does link
back to a lot of stuff that we've
discussed if I can go back and find
where where did I put my there my zoom
window
okay yeah for those of you watching the
pre-show it's early for us we're just
getting our coffee or tea
yep so you're still drinking tea though
right yep uh the only time I went to
Coffee was when I was in Nolensville um
couple week weeks ago for the CPA cuz
they didn't really have good tea options
so I just had plain coffee that day it's
fun it's just funny that you use C
because I do that all the time and I'll
be chided sometimes for it where it's
like you don't drink coffee like well I
say coffee because everybody relates and
if I say tea it like throws them off
unless I want it to be like a Icebreaker
because like oh tea who drinks tea like
I do and then I can go into my you know
my history of teas and how I have you
know decided which ones I like and which
ones I don't and how I all my little tea
rituals and stuff like that
so anyway so I think we've got a topic
so good thing bad I got all kinds of one
in the same so I think we'll be able to
Dive Right into those so we're going to
do Disaster Recovery first okay my audio
still good oh yeah yeah I'm not hearing
any background it's really getting bad
here so I just want to make sure it's
not bleeding through yeah just before we
start yeah that was like yesterday we
had guy across the street was like he's
put in a pool now he's tearing up his
driveway and it was like I was like how
long can you have that little beep beep
beep of backing up it was like for 10
minutes straight and it was right when I
was on a call and it was with guys that
had like strong accents and all of them
it's all guys and I've got like strong
accents and deep voices and they're soft
not like super soft talkers but not real
loud and then it's over zoom and it's
mics and all this and then I've got this
beeping and I'm just like ah I was
hurting by the end of it just trying to
like concentrate and hear what was being
said
and the sad thing was I had a window
open and after like I was I don't know
how far into it where I was like I'm
just struggling to hear and I was like
oh it sort of registered that like
there's all this noise going on there's
a window open so I shut the window it
helped a little but it's just like the
cool thing was you know we had that
going and you know when I'm listening to
other people it doesn't come through on
the mic so it's like it's miserable here
but you know unless like I think the
only thing I've ever had come through
the mic was when a like a fire truck or
ambulance or something went right out
the front door and I had the windows
open wow all right sorry that's my fa
I'm sidetracking too much and we'll go
back to our little
three2 well hello and welcome back we
are continuing our season of building
better businesses but we are actually
building better developers we are the
develop andur podcast and this
episode when disaster strikes how are
you going to recover that's where we're
going with this one but first i'm going
to introduce myself my name is Rob
Broadhead I am one of the founders of
developing or building better developers
also a founder of RB Consulting where
we way before the disaster strike uh
sometimes actually the disaster it feels
like a disaster because you have this
technology sprawl and all of the pain
and the sweat Blood Sweat and Tears that
went into it and you've got all this
nice stuff and you've spent all this
money and you've invested in technology
or you're thinking about invested in
technology and it's just a little too
much and we sit down with you and we
walk through what is your business do
what is your secret sauce what is the
special recipe that you have for your
customers and then we craft a special
recipe of technology for you to serve
your customers and your business so that
you can go out there and actually do the
things you want to do we do this through
simplification automation integration
even Innovation we may even help you
build a custom solution for you that is
not going to take you know the billions
of dollars that you may think it does
and we can get it down to something
that's going to work with your budget
your time uh and help you grow so that
this is going to be something will work
for you today tomorrow 6 months from now
10 years from now well maybe not 10 but
we're going to get a stretch it as far
out as we
can good thing bad thing my I have like
the quintessential good thing bad thing
this week of like I went got a house on
the market couple of days later got a
cash offer awesome surprisingly like was
the whole thing was better than we
thought faster than we expected the bad
side of that is they want us out in two
weeks is we close in two weeks so it is
just like just you know busier than a
one-legged man in an ass kicking contest
as I used to say uh so it is a good and
a bad if there ever was one uh but
another good thing is that Michael is
here with me so we can do yet another
episode and he's going to introduce
himself hey everyone my name is Michael
M I'm one of the co-founders of
developer n building better developers
this season building better businesses
I'm also the founder of Envision QA
where through quality assurance testing
we come in and walk you through your
software sprawl we figure out your
problems and from a user's perspective
we walk through all your processes all
those little nuances that you do with
your current software or your current
systems and help you identify what it is
that you have is it working for you do
you need something custom or do you just
need to go buy a tool like maybe
Microsoft Office or some other type of
profiling tool we help you with these
things we help make technology work for
you not you work for technology good and
bad uh good uh getting a lot done it's
getting warmer spring is almost heater
getting the yard ready for the uh
Springtime flowers gardening bad side
the pollen is here my allergies are
already starting to get bad and my car
is starting to turn yellow so uh that's
where I'm I'm ready for spring to get
here the flowers to come out and be nice
and be done it it's like this is that
time of year where I am miserable
because it's like popping allergy pills
every day I know the feeling I'm a
Clarian bro I guess in that sense or
algra or all of the other zerex and all
those I have to cycle through them now
let's talk about disasters and more
specifically Disaster Recovery this is
an area I think we I know even large
businesses that I've worked with that
their Disaster Recovery plan is is very
minimal now it has definitely gotten
better in the last I don't know 10 to 20
years
particularly um with cloud services and
software as a service and some of those
things we are more likely to have just
offset just sort of push off to somebody
else the concerns about Disaster
Recovery because now if we've got
everything in the cloud we don't have to
worry about our data center getting
struck and you know or Worse what used
to be somebody spills coffee on the
server back in the you know in the
closet that have we call a server
room but and there used to be things
like offsite backups and all these
things we did that now is sort of just
it just sort of comes with software as a
service it says comes with cloud
services but there still needs to be an
intentionality to that and that's what I
talk a little bit about in Disaster
Recovery now first it is the it is the
most basics of these is that you have
whether you're you know Windows or Apple
or whatever your primary system is
whatever your uh main provider what you
know if it's Google if you like a you
know Google Docs kind of company and you
use Google Sheets and all that in Google
Drive or whether you use like a maybe
like Dropbox for showing a lot of stuff
or maybe you use
Windows in their uh Windows environment
or their Azure environment those kinds
of things you still need to make sure
because a lot of these will back stuff
up to the cloud one you want to make
sure that you've got like the right uh
level of M membership or subscription or
whatever it is to the services so that
your stuff can you can put your stuff
out there that you need but then you
also need to make sure that you're
intentional about where you put it so
that it does get backed up and and put
out on the server on you on the regular
basis things like Google Drive Dropbox
and Microsoft's um that I just lost the
name of it off the top of my head but
those Services they start with uh a
specific folder basically and the things
that are in those folders just just
automatically get sucked up and synced
and it makes your life a lot easier
however you need to make sure you do
this that you you take advantage of this
that you store stuff on there now a lot
of like the nice thing and I'm normally
not a huge Windows fan but one of the
nice thing about the windows stuff is
that it will just your folder your
desktop and that it will pull that stuff
in by default it will just store that
off out on your your one drive and and
everything's
good uh but you do need to be
cognizant about that and what you put
there so that you're making sure that
stuff gets backed up but also there's a
lot of things that we do that are not
particularly a part of that that are not
our normal documents and so one of the
things I think you should consider is on
a regular basis and we've talked about
that just along the same lines of making
sure that you've got your licenses up to
date and things like that so make sure
that you have a backup of your software
of the applications that you use
especially these days because a lot of
what we get is digital we go down
download it we do whatever we need to so
we need to make sure that if something
happens to that desktop that laptop your
phone that if you go to another one you
have all of the things in place so you
know where to like download the software
you use you need you know where to you
know how to reconnect to things how do
you log in how do you have the right IDs
and this is not just you this is for
your business so this is where you put
things in place you have processes and
procedures even if if you're a very
small business to say okay this is where
we put our business documents this is
how we store them this is how often we
do backups and I would do them even
outside of those software as of services
because you never know like Amazon's
going to like there have been Amazon's
gone down Microsoft's gone down Dropbox
have gone down these things have gone
down and so you want to be able to
access your stuff if you need to now
this can be as simple as um having like
a nice little thumb drive or an external
drive because these USB drives these
days are you know it's maybe for a
couple hundred bucks you can have like
four or five terabytes of data that you
can store uh I've got so I've got one
that's just uses Microsoft or mic
Apple's time machine I just put all the
stuff out there so I can I have a backup
all the time on this thing and I can
take it wherever I want I don't care you
know and it's always there with me and
I've got all kinds of data on
it but you what you want to do is think
through what is the worst case to get
started on this like what's the worst
can happen what you know it it depends
on how you work but is if like what if I
don't have internet connection what if
um my my desktop gets destroyed or my
laptop gets destroyed how do I continue
serving the business that I need to now
we're going to talk a little bit in the
next episode more about like business
continuity and some things during this
but Disaster Recovery is really more
about if I were like just maybe it's as
simple as if I unplug all of my servers
and devices and I plug them back in will
they come back up and everything connect
as it needs to be and it's things like
doing failovers so if I've got a u if
somewhere I've got a software as a
service or I've got a let's say I've got
a database that I use for my
business if that site goes down if that
location goes down you know if I've got
let's say I'm using Dropbox or Amazon
Dropbox I they they hide you from a
little bit but especially if you're
using Amazon or Azure or Google uh cloud
and those things they're going to have
regions where your servers exist and so
what you this is where you think on the
bigger side on Disaster Recovery it's
like what if the east coast of the US
gets wiped out in storms or something
like that and it goes
down are my servers still going to be
valid can I move my business and
everything to the West Coast for example
now these may
seem too rare to take to think through
but it only takes one you if it happens
once every 5 years but during that five
years you have a down period where your
business disappears effectively for 5
days what does that do to you it may not
be a big thing if you're a side Hustle
but as you get further along what does
that do to you you know and particularly
it's things like this things that I
think are most important with these is
like what happens to payroll you know
what if I can't access does my will
payroll still work will my people get
paid will I get paid will money flow the
the things that are the you know the
heart and soul of your business are
those going to be able to still recover
and move
forward even though you know there's
been a a nuclear war or a meteor hit or
something like that some literally in
some cases the act of God kinds of
things that go on what happens there and
how do I go back and restore where I was
and this is actually just one last thing
I'm going to throw it to Michael because
I've talked too long on this at this
point but the other thing is in the the
with the extra lens of there are lot of
cyber attacks that go on where people
get locked out of their systems and so
those are probably even more likely than
these Act of God things that I've
mentioned but they are the same kind of
thing it's like what if somebody hacks
your system gets a hold of everything
how do you go back to a point before you
were hacked and re you know restart your
business basically and not have to pay
whatever Their fines are and I'm going
to not make you pay a fine though and
throw this over to Michael for a little
bit and see what you know what your
thoughts are and of these and where what
are some of your experiences with
Disaster Recovery yeah so we worked at a
company years ago uh but before you came
on board uh one of the things that first
kind of turned me on to Disaster
Recovery was the fact that the company
server room was destroyed in a fire
because the server room was next door to
a dry cleaners or to a restaurant that
had a kitchen fire and literally wiped
out our server room and you know it took
them months to recover because their
backups weren't anywhere else it was
just their uh at that one particular
location so the whole idea of Disaster
Recovery preparedness is basically to
make sure that you have a way to stand
up your business again in case something
happens and banks have been doing this
for years hospitals have been doing this
for years pre cloud and a lot of them
still do this but what they do is they
back up their systems once a day once a
week they critical information daily uh
larger scale backups weekly monthly it's
probably a more aggressive backup and
what they do with those is they take
those offsite so they actually go put
them in lock boxes secure places they
can actually handle extreme weather fire
flooding so if anything happens to the
business they can go offsite take those
tapes rebuild the server room or
whatever they have to do pop it back in
and they've got their data back now they
may be down for a couple days but at
least they are able to bring things back
up now over the years as Rob mentioned
we now have cloud services we have
better external backups through USB
drives external hard drives so we don't
have to necessarily rely on the slow
tape backups anymore we could even have
remote uh hostings so you could go with
cloud services or you could even go with
off-site storage uh essentially have
your own virtual Cloud get your own uh
like hire your own service rooms go buy
a rack at one offsite uh server and just
have your backups go there they're still
secure they're not in the cloud and this
is especially important for those of you
that have uh critical information like
pii uh banking information financial
information those things you kind of
want to keep secure and a lot of cloud
services aren't uh Hippa or socks
compliant a lot of them are but you have
to pay for it so you have options uh
these are just some of the things you
can do one of the things I like to do is
I keep an offshore backup CU I've got
two locations and what I also do is
locally like Rob mentioned uh he uses uh
like time machine backups and backs up
his machines to uh external drives I
also uh there the external or the home
business options for backups have gotten
better uh you can actually now buy a
personal Nas for about $300 and that
gives you up to 10 tab of backup raid uh
one where you can have a perfect image
and if one of the drives fail you just
pop it up take the drive out pop another
one in boom you're good to go now I
still back that up once a month and I
take that offsite but it's right here
it's not in the cloud all my stuff's
private it's protected now if both
places get destroyed I do have some
virtual information for critical
business infrastructure needs in the
cloud in
Dropbox so what you want to do is you
kind of want to look at what you have
and break it out diversify it uh put it
in places where it makes sense so
critical business information so this
was something that I never really
thought of but like Rob mention what if
the banks go down you know where's your
money well this actually happened to me
recently where my account got hit for
fraud by my own bank doing something
with my bank I was buying a service
through them to set something up and
they locked me out for a week I was
panicked because I physically had to go
into the location the banker tried to
work it through it with me and here I am
um two months later almost three months
later and I find out it's still not done
my account is still got certain
lockdowns in it
so I'm now looking at how can I disaster
recover my bank do I need to diversify
my Banks even to have certain critical
information at One Bank other financial
information at another bank so if one
goes down I still have access to money
somewhere else so that's just one thing
that a lot of people don't think about
the other thing and this was actually
rather interesting um probably about a
decade ago uh my mother had a house fire
my mom was self-employed running flea
markets all her tax information and
personal information went up in the fire
all of it was gone we had to go to the
accountant and the accountant had to
kind of back dat all her notes to put
together a tax history so your financial
information your uh you know all your
files for your business keep keep paper
copies but also scan those copies as
soon as you get them into some type of
cloud environment or digital environment
and get those somewhere safe be a lock
box at a bank or somewhere else but make
sure that you keep those separate uh you
can also do that for your home stuff too
I recommend that because you know if
your Social Security C goes up it's a
pain in the ass to get another one so
little things like this you don't think
about daily but these are things that if
it disaster
strikes you are going to be in a whole
lot of pain trying to get your life back
together so decrease that now by being
prepared by getting things together
that's the whole point of this Disaster
Recovery uh and one last thing I'll note
is Rob mentioned you know back up those
online systems like websites uh you know
any Services you have a customer mine
just recently had their website hacked
and even though they were doing daily
backups the backups had exceeded the
period from when the site was hacked to
the backups so all they had were bad
backups so I recommend if you do stand
up any type of software be a mobile app
be it a website whatever software is
perfect for this the moment you go live
have a snapshot a backup put it in a
container whatever but then store that
somewhere else and say do not touch get
it off your system get it where no one
can touch it and put it where you will
always find it so if disaster strikes
you can go pull that out plug it in
restore your site within hours even
minutes and be back online and not have
your business be
down there's a couple key things there
that I think we should people miss out
is that you do need to test your
Disaster Recovery um what Michael say is
a perfect example is that that like
periodically you need to make sure that
you do have backup so that your backup
process is not an issue I may have
shared this before but this actually is
something that goes Way Way Back is I
had a this back when I was in college I
would back up my senior project backed
it up religiously like I think
daily the problem I had was that the
drive and this was back in the world of
like hard Diss and floppy discs and
stuff like that the drive I had was
slowly failing so every time it wrote to
a disc it was at a slightly different
speed a slightly different way that it
did it so that was literally not
readable by any device within a about a
week and so I was sitting there backing
all this stuff up and I could always
like back it up and I could go look at
it and see that oh the files are right
there but even on the same machine a
week later the the drive that had
written it was now moved has like
degraded to it couldn't read it anymore
either so I had all these backups and I
thought I was doing great but I didn't
test it often enough I didn't use
another device off enough I ended up
losing everything we had to the only
thing we had was we had actually had
hard print out outs of our code and had
to from those recode the entire solution
and it just happened to be that like it
was
fortunate that we had that kind of a
backup in similar sense there was a
couple years ago that there were a whole
bunch of companies that were well
actually and I can't think of the name
of them right oh I think it's parlor was
a social site they went out there and
they did their thing and they have this
great growing community and they were
locked into a single vendor they worked
with and I'll just throw the names out
there you can find them but they worked
with Amazon they used Amazon cloud
services and they breached the service
contract with Amazon something they did
breached the service contract and so
Amazon shut them down this is a you know
I guess at that point multi-million or
more maybe hundreds of millions company
that now is shut down and they have no
access to their stuff their customers
have no access to them and this is where
not only do you want to test your
disaster recovery but you want to make
sure that you do this on a regular basis
that you have multiple Disaster Recovery
sites don't have just one like Michael
said is you like you have maybe
something local then you have something
offsite and you have something even
further out now how you do that may be
you know there's a cost Effectiveness to
it but verify that your that your
Disaster Recovery plan works like I said
the way that you do this sometimes a lot
the big businesses do it if they've got
a Data Center and they've got a disaster
recovery plan they will test test it by
they will go in there and they will just
turn turn the switch off on the data
center and say okay now what happens
does does everything fail over properly
all that kind of stuff does it does the
business then sort of like spin back up
a second later or a minute later or an
hour later whatever it is to recover
from that
disaster and so you need to think about
how that could work what that would look
like to you and create a test plan and
test your Disaster Recovery I would say
at least once a year a lot of times like
every six months is a is a pretty good
way to do it because you want to make
sure before it happens that you know how
to recover from it that you know how to
you know ensure that you haven't lost
the things that you've lost and be
properly
prepared all of this being what it is
I'm going to throw out our standard go
ahead if you have questions if you have
comments if you have suggestions if you
have War Stories from disasters that
have hit you shoot us an email at info
developer.com you can also reach out to
us on the developer.com site you can
leave us a contact form but before I go
any further I'm going to throw it back
to Michael for a second I think you have
something to add you forgot the
challenge did I forget the challenge yes
I did but see this is a good example of
Disaster Recovery is my brain just like
shut down but I have a backup and I just
tested it so there you go I could say
that that was planned but I would be
lying if I did so that is though what
the challenge is actually it's a
two-parter it is created recovery plan
if you don't have one and say what what
does it look like what do I do do your
backups whatever you need to do and then
test it as part of that to complete this
challenge to complete this task is test
your Disaster Recovery is you know go to
for example a lot of times I I'm very
much driven by one like my I've got two
machines but I've got one particular
laptop that I have very often that has
been my that is where I go to do all of
my business and so the way for me to do
it is I just put that laptop away and I
go try to like you know I'll have
another laptop or I'll sit on desktop or
I'll do something to say okay can I do
the critical things so I don't have to
do that's like really nice because I
just put the I pretend the laptop
doesn't exist and when I'm done with my
Disaster Recovery test wow I pretend
that it exists again and it's right
there things like that can make it very
easy especially as a side hustle kind of
business and if as you're growing that
is where you want to go as you want to
start from this you know from from the
very start being able to do this that's
just going to allow you to build the
processes the procedures and all the
steps that will make that work even as
your business
grows now now we will wrap up because we
have challenged you uh you can also
leave us uh leave us feedback wherever
you get your podcast you can go out to
developer.com channel on YouTube if you
want to check us out there leave us
comments lots of content out there lots
of content on the developer Nord site um
if you're if you struggle developer our
site we are in talks with our amongst
ourselves basically of doing some
upgrades there it's been around for a
while we're going to move do some server
changes and such so it also might be
down a little bit here and there but I'm
trying to get that it's like it's one of
those things that you like you know your
server is starting to get older and
older those squirrels that are running
around or the the hamsters running
around their wheels are getting a little
old a little slow so do a couple updates
and things like that and see what we can
do to uh to bring it up into at least
this century
that being said go out there and have
yourself a great day a great week and we
will talk to you next
time Ah that's not how I wanted to do
that bonus
material you're in a roll today it is
like and I'm this is my second cup of
tea I'm like and I'm going to on the
break I'm going to go get a third cup of
tea and maybe that'll like kick some
brain cells in I'm on my first but all
right bonus stuff so
interestingly enough one of the things
Rob touched on near the end is you know
working on multip multiple devices like
laptop desktop and being able to work
from like a central code repository or
documentation now if you have it set up
right you already have disaster recovery
but if you don't have it set up right
you may have a single point of failure
where if your cloud service goes down or
if your Hardware goes down your external
drive goes down you're out of luck
you're dead in the water so one of the
best things you can do for Disaster
Recovery is take a look at what you're
doing you know do you have one machine
if you have one machine make sure you've
got backups of that hard drive if you're
virtual and you have multiple machines
communicating with each other uh make
sure that they have that they're being
backed up and that the uh like cloud
service or wherever that's also being
backed up or you have a way to get that
offline if you need to
um especially if you travel because one
of the fun things I ran into recently is
uh I went to Nashville and I was sitting
at a coffee shop and their Wi-Fi went
now well all my stuff's in the cloud so
how do I work well thankfully I was
still able to plug in my phone and use
my phone as a Hotpot but these are
little things that's a perfect example
if you turn your Wi-Fi off can you still
work can you access your most critical
files do you have a backup of that so
it's just an idea to kind of get you
thinking about hey am I ready if the
lights go
out I think that's that's the nice thing
about that's like one of the best ways
to me is to to look at your Disaster
Recovery plan and things like that is do
some try remote work um it's it is
amazing how many little things that I
like for example if you don't have an
internet connection I think we've talked
about that before there's a lot of uh a
lot of the applications and code I use
part of like spinning it up
is it's going to go reach out to some
CDN somewhere and if I don't have that
then I don't if I don't have access to
it I I don't have access to those files
and then things won't run right and they
won't work right and I can work around
them if I need to but if it was a longer
term deal then you know I want to make
sure that I've I've protected myself
from that so I think that's like if you
if you want some ideas on some of the
things that could go wrong some of the
things that you want to look you know
that are potentials is you know go out
and try like look up uh remote work or
road warrior or you know those kinds of
things uh one of the things that's
really is just go like take a drive on a
weekend and just go out to the middle of
nowhere and can you do the work that you
need to do and if not then like what are
the things that you might need so that
you can build those up and make sure
that you are properly covered as as far
as disaster
goes all right now we will wrap this one
up we've got some bonus material we we
are coming back we are not done with
this season yet
and uh we will be back with the next
episode we're going to talk uh business
continuity so we're going to get a
little bit different it's uh but in the
same vein of stuff so it's going to be a
similar kind of Challenge and uh
hopefully you will be much better
prepared by the time you get past these
next couple of uh episodes that being
said have yourself a good one and we
will talk to you next time
[Music]