When we talk about disaster recovery it is easy to get carried away with the big picture – servers, routers, Internet connections and all the expensive bits.

But sometimes it is important to also look at the small things. We’ve been in this situation ourselves. We’ve allocated our spare PCs to new users until we have no spare machines. Then one of the PCs fails and we have a user out of action. In our case we had the PC repairs fairly quickly (as you would hope!), but I still had a member of staff out of action for half a day.

We took the opportunity to buy new spare. The out of action staff member had this as a new PC and their old one now sits on a shelf set up and ready and waiting for the next time one of our PCs fail.

This scenario is duplicated at a lot of our clients. Even to the point where we’ve been told that they don’t want us to fix a problem on a machine, because the user needs it all the time, and can’t face being without it for a few hours whilst we work on it. A spare PC won’t be perfect, but it will keep the user running, and reduce the stress of having someone unable to get on with their work.