INFORMACHINE BACKUP for The Information Company

The Information Company (TIC), a communications solution company with clients like Tata Sons, Aditya Birla, and Godrej, has a team of around 75 writers, editors, designers and software engineers. The agency operates from the sixth floor of a multi-storied building in CBD Belapur, Navi Mumbai, in India. Every day over a hundred pages of content was created or recreated for client websites, besides other work, such as magazines and e-zines.

Introduction

The company had installed Organyze 2.1 for its back-up, sync and search requirements. All files would get backed up automatically on external hard disks, and the hard disks would be taken out and stored in another location some 4 km. away.

Three sets of external drives were used for the back-up, only one of which was kept in the office premises. At any given time these disks maintained a complete back-up of data of the previous two days.

The incident

On 19 august 2013, a major fire broke out around 3.30 am, affecting the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth floors of the building, The fire completely engulfed the company’s office on the sixth-floor, and every single computer in the premises was destroyed along with much other equipment and material. By 9.30 am, the fire brigade was able to bring the situation under control, and there were no casualties (since the offices had all been closed). The entire 10-storey building was ordered to be shut down (for the next three months).

At 10:00 am, the company’s IT team made a provision of an alternative workplace in a rented bungalow nearby.

Speedy restoration

By 3:30 pm, on 19th august itself, new machines had been acquired and software was installed. The external drives were used to back up data to the new machines. Makeshift tables were fabricated, and the cabling was completed with newly purchased cables to recreate the local area network (LAN).

By evening the network was operational. Until many of the staff worked from their machines at home. The entire team was back in action the same day!

Not a single client even realized there was any problem, much less a fire that had destroyed the entire office!