Disaster recovery? It's not thought about much by churches, but the ramifications of not being prepared can be severe.

If your church was flooded or burned to the ground tomorrow, would you lose all of the valuable archives of pictures, videos and print publications from years past?

If your computer network cratered or critical computers took massive power hits or lost hard drives, would you be up and running within 24 hours?

I know that it's not something I thought about until after I was out working in the AV industry. I'd been on staff at three different mega churches and never had even thought about a disaster recovery plan! At two of the churches, we had decades of video tapes, audio tapes, CD's and even a growing collection of DVD's that were all sitting (yes, conveniently) in one air-conditioned room. If we'd had a major fire (or even a minor one that kicked on the sprinkler system), I'm confident that thousands of memories would have been lost forever.

One of my very best friends is a computer networking and server guru, who works for the really big boys of computing. He first introduced me to network backups and off-site storage as a way to ensure my personal computer data is protected.

To this day, I back up both of my big PC's onto external hard drives (one for each system) and place them in my Credit Unions' climate controlled and secure safety deposit boxes. Each week, I go to the Credit Union, get the drives, back up the machines at home and take the drives back for another weeks' storage.

In a worst case scenario, I'd have to buy a new PC (with insurance money!) install the backup software and, within an hour, I'd be back up to where I was on my last backup date. As an additional precaution, I also backup the My Documents folder to DVD once a month, so that I have quick access to documents in case I accidentally delete something. Plus, I shut down my PC once every other day and do a clean boot to take advantage of Window's built-in recovery. I even keep working copies of commonly used documents on my USB Jump Drive for ease of use and quick, small "backups."

These are the basic steps I take for just a couple of PC's. You can choose to backup online (you rent secure server space). But for us media folks, the cost to backup Terabytes of data online (as in large video and audio files) can be cost prohibitive. In these instances, you can choose to do backups to an off-site RAID or even use Firewire or USB external hard drives.

No matter which type of backup and off-site storage you choose, make sure you do it now, while you can point to the unfortunate disasters from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita as motivation for your church leadership to take preventative measures.

Reprinted with permission from the Church Media Hotlist Newsletter.

Anthony Coppedge provides consulting to churches for developing and growing a Media Ministry, building teams, casting vision and even choosing the right equipment. He lives in Bedford, Texas, with his wife and two daughters and can be reached at anthony@anthonycoppedge.com.