“Belt and Suspenders” This phrase came to mind today as I visited a client who was getting a hardware failure message when starting up his computer.
For those not familiar with the phrase, the use of both a belt and suspenders to hold up one’s pants ensures you’ll never unexpectedly have your pants at your knees. In the technology world it can mean having redundant safety procedures in place to reduce risk of failures.
The error he was getting implied that the system hard drive wasn’t there, certainly a catastrophe in the making. Fortunately, we had recommended a belt (complete data backup both onsite and in the Cloud) and suspenders (mirrored hard drives in case one drive fails) and so I was confident that the worst-case scenario wouldn’t be all that bad.
As it turned out, the error was due to a startup configuration setting which was easily corrected. My client didn’t need to implement any emergency recovery procedures to get back up and working. But if he had, we could!
With modern operating systems (Windows and OSX) it’s easy and inexpensive to put “belt and suspenders” in place.
Check out the many local/Cloud-based backup services (One of my favorites is Crashplan from Code42.com) to make sure your data is backed up and accessible no matter the problem.
With Windows (since XP) there has been the capability to add a 2nd hard drive and create an identical mirror of everything on the main hard drive. Almost every modern computer already has the necessary electronics built in to power and control an additional hard drive.
These inexpensive options will allow you to add “belt and suspenders” to your system so you don’t get caught with your pants down in case of a hardware failure.
