It must have been something in the air. Maybe it was the utility company playing games with delivering power. Maybe it was the excessive heat and humidity. All I know is that it was an unusual month in terms of the hardware infrastructure in my office and in many of my clients’.

A few weeks ago, our lights were dimming and then we had a blackout on a cool evening. Between those two events, the 4-year-old uninterrupted power supply (UPS) connected to my workstation died. While one occasionally may have to replace the heavy and expensive batteries inside a UPS, it’s rare for a unit to fail completely. My luck ran out that day when, after speaking with the company’s technical support department, we determined I was unable to re-engage the circuit breaker that had popped. The diagnosis: The unit was terminal and needed replacing. A few days and nearly $200 later, my workstation was again protected against electric ebbs and flows.

For a number of years, I’ve had a separate UPS on the server and each workstation to protect them from power outages, surges or, more commonly, drops in current. While a good UPS costs at least $100, they’re much better protection than inexpensive power strips.

While most firms that go to the effort of purchasing a dedicated server usually have a UPS to protect it, they rarely consider protecting their workstations from the games utility companies may play with our power. If you occasionally see lights flicker or have any reason to suspect power-related problems in your office building, it’s worth the expense to equip each computer with a UPS so if power drops enough, the battery will power down the computer after a designated amount of time.

Thunderstorms and summer heat can result in power companies delivering less than safe amounts of current, so a little protection will go a long way. While it had to be replaced, my UPS protected my computer and data.

Then there was …

That same week, a client who was less fortunate reported one of the two mirrored hard drives in the server failed, causing data corruption in the timekeeping and billing database. The firm diligently backed up its data, so I could try various repairs knowing eventually we’d roll back the data to the day before the hard-drive failure. Luckily, we were able to repair the damaged database.

Two crises handled, but there were more that week. My family recently got an Apple Ipod and I wanted to make a CD of the songs we purchased and downloaded from Itunes. When I attempted to make the CD, I got an error message advising me that if I had a Dell computer, which I did, I should go to the Dell website to download and install a specific driver. When the installation reached the 95 percent mark, it stopped. When I restarted my computer, I got what is fondly called the “blue screen of death.” If you’ve never seen it, rejoice. It’s never good news — it usually means something is seriously wrong with Windows or the computer itself.

After spending several hours pulling the hard drive out of the computer to do an extra backup of the files that were only on my local hard drive, I had to reinstall Windows, then reinstall and reconfigure every program on my office computer. Again, like with my client, I was lucky. (Or is it really luck if you have backups and enough systems in place to get back to where you were?)

Most firms, mine included, correctly focus their backup efforts on data stored on the server. A firm’s intellectual property — word processing forms and documents, billing data, accounting information, and firm wide case and contact information cannot be easily replicated. In contrast, the typical workstation generally stores program files and little, if any, firm-specific data. If you’ve ever upgraded or bought a new computer, you know it can be time-consuming to reinstall and reconfigure all the programs.

Storing data

Many firms don’t allow data to be stored on local drives. This allows them to use disk-imaging software like Symantec’s Ghost (about $49) to return to the original setup. Large external hard drives that connect to a computer’s USB drive and cost between $200 and $500, depending on how much data they can store, are a good alternative for small firms. With a 250-GB external drive, you can either make incremental copies of one workstation’s files or copies of several workstations’ drives.

While all my critical data is stored and backed up on my server, I store family photos, downloaded music and files related to my volunteer activities on my workstation’s local hard drive. While I had an older backup of these files on my external hard drive and some also were on CDs or DVDs as additional backup, I knew, when told I would have to reinstall Windows on my desktop, it was worth the additional time and effort to remove that drive, put it into another computer in the office as its second drive and make an extra copy of the more recent files and photos.

While it cost me about a day’s time to back up, reinstall Windows and my regularly used programs, I was lucky and got away with my wallet intact. But, the week wasn’t over yet!

Just as I was getting back up, my assistant’s monitor died. After an hour of disconnecting and reconnecting cables and another hour of convincing Dell by swapping my monitor for hers that the problem was the motherboard, we were scheduled for a service call. Again, we were lucky — while waiting for the repair, she was able to work from my laptop on our network-accessible documents, data and programs.

And finally …

One more crisis lurked. Just as we were catching up on the work delayed while we were down, we lost our internet connection. These days, losing access to e-mail and web pages for research and information is almost as debilitating as a hard-drive crash. A call to Comcast determined our cable modem was working. A little more research determined our hardware-based firewall meant to keep out unwanted intruders had failed. (Could this also have been a casualty of the surges and dips in our electricity?) The temporary fix required a trip to the computer store, the purchase a $40 network router and reconnecting it in place of the firewall while it was sent off for repair. Again, we lost time (and money in not being able to focus on our work), but we didn’t lose irreplaceable data.

While writing this column, another client called who wasn’t so lucky. That firm’s network technician backed up the server onto a large external hard drive before re-partitioning the server drives so they would be better-suited to the firm’s storage needs. Somehow, despite several different backups, much of the firm’s data was lost when it was unable to be fully restored.

Even so, it could have been worse. While hard-drive failures are much rarer than before, they still occur frequently and now put much larger amounts of data at risk. An entire industry has developed to recover the unrecoverable. Companies like OnTrack Data Recovery, Drive Savers, Action Front and ESS Data offer data-recovery services. The costs depend on the size of the drive, the complexity of the problem and the needed turnaround time. The sooner you need it, the more it will cost. If you can wait up to a week, the bill will be about $500. For a true emergency, data recovery can cost up to $9.000.

In a future column, I’ll take a look at the feasibility of including internet-based backup services in your bag of tricks. I wouldn’t recommend it as the only method of backup; one obvious drawback is if you lose your internet connection, you can’t get to your backup either.

When you consider how reliant we’ve become on computers and, more important, the irreplaceable data stored on them, suddenly the cost of a UPS for each computer, external hard drive for additional backups and the time needed to do regular backups starts to pale in comparison to the possible losses.

We can’t always count on being lucky!

Carol L. Schlein is president of Law Office Systems in Montclair, a training and consulting firm specializing in law firm automation. Copies of previous columns are on her company website, www.losinc.com. For information about her quarterly meetings for Time Matters users, check the website or e-mail info@losinc.com. Schlein formerly chaired the Computer and Technology Division of the ABA Law Practice Management Section.

Questions for Carol L. Schlein on law office technology may be faxed to New Jersey Lawyer at (732) 650-7010, e-mailed to news@njlnews.com or mailed to “Law Technology Questions,” New Jersey Lawyer, Edison Square, 2035 Lincoln Highway, Suite 3005, Edison, N.J. 08817.