Inventory management system at NZ Fine Prints

We've had our share of business misfortune over the years.

Our office in the late 1960s was abandoned after a fire in the National Party offices below it, there was another fire which destroyed our picture moulding factory, Avon Picture Mouldings in 1979 and then there was the earthquakes of 2010/2011 - after which we had the most dramatic gallery opening ever!

But we have never had a computer disaster until last week.

This is me inspecting the Avon Picture Mouldings fire aged 6

Like most businesses NZ Fine Prints' have backups, and backups and then a backup in the cloud.  But when a key computer's hard drive slowly gave up over a few weeks without us realising it was happening we discovered that a disaster recovery plan did not mean instant recovery and business as usual.  The problem was that the backup that should just have been able to be loaded back on to another hard drive was also affected by failure of the hard drive to organise the data properly over several weeks.

This computer takes care of our inventory, tracking the thousands of product lines at prints.co.nz.  As soon as we couldn't process inward goods the parcels of prints from artists and publishers began piling up. I couldn't believe how many packages we got as they stacked up across the stockroom floor.  We stopped shipping orders for a couple of days, expecting to be back up and running.  But in the end it took a week to get all the files off the hard-drive and installed onto a brand new iMac.  We shipped out on a paper based system and then had to process a week's orders all at once.

It was a complete nightmare and we have changed our systems to make sure that this never happens again.

The moral really is not to become complacent, we have apparently been super lucky with our Apple computers over the years - we keep them for five years before upgrading and have never had a hard drive fail before.  Apparently most people have had this experience so we were lulled into a false sense of security...

We don't yet do all our processing in the cloud so are looking to move more of our processes off the desktop computers, but what if the internet connection goes down.  We haven't had that yet.  Sun flares anyone?