Those of us up here in NE see very few natural disasters severe enough to destroy records – but there is always fire and broken pipes – those do happen. Whether natural, accidental, or human-made, disasters result in data loss and enormous headaches for small businesses unless they prepare ahead of time to deal with them.
The camera in your cell phone is your best friend. Take pictures of anything you for which you might need to establish the physical existence or condition frequently – certainly anytime something changes. Then, after the disaster, you can compare those pictures to post-disaster pictures to better define your loss and perhaps even to help reconstruction.
Use online storage as much as possible. If you don’t use online apps, make sure you have an off-site or cloud-based backup. The used office furniture stores are full of filing cabinets which no longer have value because a very high percentage of everything has already been converted to digital storage. If a pipe breaks, you’re going to be much happier sifting through those pdfs than you are the stuck together moldy pieces in that filing cabinet. If you aren’t converting, you probably should be.
The IRS has published a helpful article in the wake of the current spat of hurricane horrors. You can find it here.
