Flooding is still impacting a good bit of the midsection of the U.S. Last week I spoke (via videoconference) to a group of lawyers from the Linn County Bar Association (Cedar Rapids, IA) about disaster recovery. The seminar was put together rather quickly, but they had no lack of offers of assistance. For those who are curious, here is the final agenda.

The short version of what I told them is that if you have Internet access, there are lots of ways to get up and running quickly from paying $50 per employee for Google Apps to downloading the 30 day free trials of various applications. The challenge is restoring your data and business operations. Several vendors offered help and, depending upon the need, there may be follow-up programs.

But as I looked out over that crowd of displaced lawyers, I thought of something that each of you should ponder today. Within that group, there were probably several who lost their entire computer system. Among those, there were probably some who had a complete off-site data backup, done very recently. There were some who had off-site backups that were several days or weeks old. And, sadly, there were probably some who had little or no data backed up outside of their office.

Which category are you in today?