The pain of a crashed hard drive is real.
Having a hard drive crash is never, ever fun. It may have happened to you before on a personal device, such as a laptop or desktop. One thing that happens when a hard drive crashes — saying “goodbye” to all your photos, documents, files, apps, and everything stored on it. It’s frustrating, it’s annoying, and it’s devastating; especially when you find out you can’t get any of that information back (which is almost always the result). All this is if it’s a personal hard drive…
What about an association?
That is a whole different story! When the hard drive of an association crashes, you risk losing everything mentioned above (files, documents, photos, etc.) AND the personal information of tens to thousands of members! Luckily, there is such a thing as backing up your data. Wooh! You’re saved.
Oh wait…………
You haven’t backed up your data in eight months, and during that eight months you’ve collected the data of over three hundred members. There’s no way to back up now and now you’ve got to re-collect it all. Ouch.
It’s not just a crashed hard drive…
Hard drives crash…it’s a common occurrence, unfortunately, there could also be other reasons your associaton’s activities could come to a halt…such as the wrath of the virus. Once computers and servers get infected, it’s no telling how many days or weeks it’ll take to “cure” it. You could lose your data, or it could be recovered, but with all that lost time, you’re still going to have extra work from the time it took to rid your computer of the virus.
The solution?
Just stop using computers! Go back to pen, paper, and liquid white out. Forget our app. Forget our blog. Forget email. Forget everything computer-related; it’s not worth it anymore. Hard drives never crashed when that’s all we used, so let’s go back!
This is not realistic…well, it technically could be, but it would be very inefficient compared to today’s processes! Some serious suggestions to fixing the problem are:
- Hire a pricey local IT guy to handle your system’s backups, computer maintenance, etc. If you can afford it, why not?! Put it in someone else’s hands. If they’re expensive, they probably know what they’re doing! It also takes a load off your mind as an executive!
- The second option is to just learn the required IT skills that you’d pay someone to have. This means you’d have to learn to make backups regularly, test them, maintain network and Internet connections, and more. This solution would save you money, but it is very time-consuming. It also increases the chance of ruining the data by human error.
- Our last (and best) solution: use a cloud-based solution. All you need is a device (computer, laptop, tablet, smartphone) with a browser that is connected to the Internet. A cloud-based solution backs up regularly and is online, so if one of your devices crash…use another one!
Alinity keeps your association safe
Our license and association management software is cloud-based. This means, like Google Drive or Drop Box, you can log into our system from any device with an Internet connection. Our solution features document management and contact management, which are features that store uploads and personal information, as well as backs it up, into three servers in three locations in Canada.This allows the data to still be recoverable if one, or even two, of the servers fails. Without the storage of documents and files in a local server, you won’t risk the chance of it crashing and it being your “be all or end all”. Your business continuity plan would also run much smoother and quicker without having to re-gather data.
English 
French