Hurricane Katrina taught us many things. For the animal shelters that were hit, we learned how our data systems look underwater. Living in Florida, we planned to continue services after we lose electricity. Whenever possible, we attempted to replicate our data on a laptop, so that we could conduct searches of our data when the lights go out. We also had a paper system to support the intake of new animals into the shelter.
We have become too dependent on technology. This blog results from one of our local schools having to cancel classes because they lost access to the internet. It is moments like this that we old guys get together to talk about how we went to school before the internet was invented. I am amazed that our school system has no plan B.
For those of you who have never experienced a hurricane, you probably have not thought about how to back up your data for the day when the power goes out. That leaves you with the possibility that if your power goes out for an extended period of time, you’ll have no records, except what you hang on the cage doors, of the animal in your care.
If you have thought about it, and are backing up your data, make sure that you do it correctly. Back in the days that I was providing tech support for PetWhere, I was approached by an animal shelter in Texas who had been faithfully backing up their data. When their data became corrupt, they discovered that their backup files were worse than the original files because they had been backing up their data on tape drives without ever replacing the tapes. After years of backing up data over the same tapes, the tapes lost the ability to be overwritten. My job was to take their current data and attempt to reconstruct it into a usable format.
Now, many of the database programs used in animal shelter management are internet-based. Hopefully, you’ve worked out a plan in which you are keeping a copy of your data locally. The Internet is more likely to go down before you lose power.