PC Disaster and Recovery

While this is another issue that will be dealt with in greater detail in Chapter 11, it’s important for you, as you consider your PC environment, to be aware of what type of protection you have against negative external influences, such as power surges or serious fluctuations.

At the very least, evaluate the following issues as part of analyzing your workspace:

• Determine whether your home or office has proper grounding, which can discourage lightning from traveling into your home and hitting sensitive devices like your PC.

• Determine whether your PC setup can have everything related to the PC plugged into outlets or devices working off a master switch that you can use to kill power to the system quickly. Doing this can help a PC and its peripherals from going on-off repeatedly.

• Determine whether your PC is plugged into any kind of power protection device, such as a good-quality surge suppressor.

• Determine whether your PC is plugged into any auxiliary backup power device, such as an uninterruptible power supply (UPS), that uses a battery between your power and PC to give you a period of time (usually a few minutes) to properly save your files and shut down your PC during a power outage.