Technical Writer

In Disaster Recovery part 1 I talked about how important it is for us as tech writers to back up information we have on the PC at home. Information that we may not even realise is important, particularly if we do most of our work for a company on the company PC. However, we still have contacts, emails and a portfolio that we really couldn’t afford to lose.

In this article I want to talk about another backup you need to consider. This is aimed mainly at tech writers in smaller companies, because in larger companies this is covered as part of the implementation project.

Suppose you have the following scenario:

You’re a lone tech writer in a team. Your information is all over the place and you’re desperate to organise it. You go online and find an open source content management system like Joomla (or even WordPress), or an inexpensive one like KBPublisher that you can convince your boss to buy. You get on well with the IT guys and they help you set up a My SQL database and give you space on a server to run it.

(Tech writing) life has never been better. You have a nice little content management system going. People use it. They even add to it, and recommend it to others.

A small system like this is often better for a small company than a monster like SharePoint.  Don’t get me wrong. I like SharePoint, but it is big, and unweildy, and has an incredibly steep learning curve. Sometimes, it’s like using a b-double road train when a bicycle is a better option.

But …

Maybe you have even discovered that your company has SharePoint and have convinced your IT people to implement Windows SharePoint Services for you and are using this for your documentation. 

Either way, what you have is a database system that has fallen outside of the usual IT control. They have let you implement it, and you’re managing it. This means you are responsible for disaster recovery too.

If you have implemented a system like this, ask yourself, “Can I afford to lose this information?” and “What will happen if I do lose it?”

If you answered ’No’ to the first question, and anything other than ’I/we have a disaster recovery plan and we can restore almost everything from the latest backup’ then it’s time to do something about it. 

Most larger system projects provide for regular backups as part of the implementation process, but when a project sneaks in the back way, with a single person implementing it, backups are usually the last thing one thinks about. The implementation is experimental anyway and it’s only when the whole project turns out to be a success that it becomes a real problem.

If you have implemented a content management system like this:

• Do you even know where the data is?
• Do you know if it is backed up at all?
• If it’s not, what are you going to do about it?

You always have to expect the worst, even if it never happens. Data is only as good as your last backup. If your database becomes corrupted, you lose everything.