Web Worker Daily

As web workers, we spend our days moving through a constantly-shifting landscape of services and servers. Our lives, livelihoods, and identities are all wrapped up in a cloud of hardware and software maintained by other people. When it all works, it’s great. But what do you do when the power fails to Web 2.0? Or when a service you’re depending on runs out of cash and closes its virtual doors?

Just as it’s sensible to have a family disaster plan in place, the wise web worker will put together an online disaster plan. While you’ll need to tailor your plan to your own needs and circumstances, we can give you some advice to get started. Here are five things to think about.

Identify your exposure – Start by thinking about what you need to plan for. This means figuring out what information you have online, and what might happen to it. Information includes things you’ve posted to your own web sites, your identities and participation in various social networks, stored bookmarks and tasks and calendar entries, and even incoming links. Potential threats include outages from an hour long to a vendor vanishing entirely without giving you any notice.

Invest effort where it’s important – If you’re at all active online, you can’t possibly insure everything against every possible disaster. Your identity and job will most likely be safe if random comments you’ve left on blogs (even WWD!) get accidentally deleted, no matter how insightful they are. But I’d think twice about entrusting a contract for six months of work solely to Google Documents, no matter how spiffy their data center. There’s always the stray backhoe between them and me.

Back up critical data – If you’re composing blog entries on your local computer and uploading, you’ve already got a backup. But if you’re writing directly online, you probably don’t. Should you download every blog entry to your local hard drive? That depends on how much long-term value you derive from your blog. Think about it this way: if your blogging host went out of business tomorrow, would it have a serious impact on your ability to attract and retain clients? Would being able to quickly recreate the blog somewhere else be good for business? If the answers are “yes,” then a local archive is a sensible precaution. Alas, you won’t get back the goodness of incoming links, but some archive is better than none. You can apply a similar analysis to whatever information is online to decide whether it’s worth making your own backups.

Beware of black holes – Unfortunately, some of the most popular online services make it difficult or impossible to plan for disaster, because they don’t provide any API for getting your information back out. There’s not much you can do here beyond recognizing that you’re taking a risk, and being prepared to switch to a competitor in case of disaster. I personally am wary of investing too much effort into a service that doesn’t let me have ready access to my data, no matter how popular or useful it seems. Fortunately, in these days of mashups this is getting less common.

Be prepared to route around damage -  Remember, data is not the only thing you have online. Set aside time to think through the consequences of losing access to each service you use, and know what your fallback plan is (if any). If you depend on an online calendar, how do you make it to meetings if you can’t get to your calendar for a day? (Perhaps it’s time to investigate one of the packages that syncs to your local computer). Are you keeping contact info exclusively online? What if you need to call an important client during that two hours when your ISP goes down? (I keep some numbers in my paper list no matter what). No one will expect you to work with a quill pen, but clients are not likely to be sympathetic if you miss a deadline because some web site they’ve never heard of had a hiccup.