Settle in, boys and girls, for a little story. It’s a scary story but don’t worry–it has a happy ending. It’s a moralistic little tale about something that happened to one of our colleagues, but doesn’t have to happen to your lawyer billing software.
This gentleman has his vital computer files stored on a mirror drive–a mirror drive is an array of two hard drives. Every time the computer writes a file, it writes it to both drives. That way if one drive fails, the information is safe on the other drive. Recently he decided to update one of his drivers–a driver is a program that tells your computer how to operate equipment like printers, video cards and hard drives. When he rebooted his system, the hard drives had disappeared.
He spent the next two days trying to find the drives. The physical drives were in the computer of course, but Windows couldn’t see them. I’ll spare you the long story of restore points and updates and blue screens and lots and lots of profanity. In the end, he found both drives had been corrupted and all of the information was lost. Over ten years of financial records, work documents, correspondence, family photos and more were gone.
Fortunately, though the information was gone from his computer, it wasn’t gone from this world. He uses a backup utility that copies his data into the cloud. It will take him weeks to recover a hard drive full of information, but at least he has that option. Without it, he would have no way to get the data back.
So what does this story have to do with attorney time and billing software? Disasters like this can happen to any of us. A corrupted driver, a virus, a fire, a hurricane or a zombie apocalypse can destroy your computer and even your local backups. Data loss could drive a legal practice out of business so you need an offsite solution.
The cloud version of Easysoft billing software for lawyers maintains your sensitive case files in our offsite servers. We use technologies such as mirror drives to ensure your data is protected from hardware failure as well as multiple periodic backups to keep your information safe even if the mirrors fail. Of course your data is encrypted and protected against unauthorized intrusion.
If you prefer to use the desktop version of Easysoft time and billing software then we strongly recommend you also use a cloud-based backup solution to protect your data.
Strong backups are just one of the many advantages of cloud-based law practice management software. Contact us at 800-905-7638 to find out if the cloud is the right environment for your law firm.
