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Flooded at 5 A.M., Back in Business in Two Days: An Elmhurst Trucking Company's Recovery
The July 2012 storm flooded an Elmhurst trucking company's office overnight, destroying fifteen workstations and two servers. Edward Technology was on-site by 5:30 a.m., rebuilt everything in two days, and restored the company's data from the previous night's offsite backup. Zero data lost. Ten people ran the company from the owner's basement while the office was rehabbed, then moved back in twelve hours.
80 mph
reported storm winds
0
data lost
15
workstations rebuilt
2 days
to operational
2
new servers
12 hrs
to move back in
The storm that made the papers
Link to article: here!
In early July 2012, a severe storm system hit the Chicago suburbs, straight-line winds reported around 80 miles per hour, widespread power outages, and flooding serious enough that Elmhurst later invested in new stormwater infrastructure. When staff arrived at the trucking company's office at 5:00 a.m., the water had already done its work: fifteen workstations and two servers, all destroyed. The warehouse took damage too. A trucking operation cannot idle, and the office itself would need weeks of rehab before anyone could sit in it again.
On-site by 5:30, rebuilt in two days, nothing lost
The call came at five. We were there by five-thirty. Over the next two days, fifteen computers and two new servers were built and configured, and the company's data was restored from the offsite cloud backup taken overnight, before the storm. Because the business closes at night, that backup was complete. The flood took every machine in the building. It could not reach the backups. Not a byte of business data was lost, and email, which lived outside the building, never went down at all.
A trucking company, run from a basement
With the office unusable, the entire setup went into the owner's basement, where ten people at a time ran the company for the better part of a month while the building was rehabbed. When it was ready, the full move back took twelve hours on a single Sunday, the day after our owner's wedding, honeymoon starting Monday. The clients were not going to wait, and they did not have to.
Where do your backups sleep?
If the answer is "in the office," the office is one storm away from being the whole story. Call 847.737.8111, or start with the complimentary onsite evaluation, it includes a plain-English review of exactly what would survive your worst morning.
