Who turned off the lights?

By Nicole Whitehorn

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, it can be assumed that you know about the extreme load-shedding currently happening in South Africa. This is inconvenient for many obvious reasons and although I personally find the fact that the traffic lights aren’t working, I can’t cook and my home is plunged into darkness, there are a lot of other more serious problems associated with load shedding that aren’t immediately obvious.
What you might not realise is how these power outages are affecting your data. Many people assume that when power is suddenly cut from your computer, it should be able to simply be turned back on again with no loss of data, when in fact quite the opposite is very often the case. When the power fails, the components don’t get a clean shutdown command and all sorts of corruptions can occur, including those that affect the integrity of your data. Think of how often when you start up again your word processor application asks you whether you want to discard unused changes. This can mean changes that were never saved to your documents and by selecting the wrong option you can lose all of these changes. A similar thing can happen with the rest of your data – you will unlikely be prompted to try and do something about it though and the data is simply lost.
As it stands, it looks as if load-shedding will be affecting South Africans for at least another two years, and while some businesses can afford to introduce precautions such as with back-ups and additional hardware in place, many of them cannot. It may be time to think about moving your database to the cloud. With Maximizer CRM you are ensured that your database is protected and that you won’t experience corruption or loss of data due to regular Eskom power outages.