July and August are peak severe-thunderstorm season here in Somerset and Hunterdon counties, and every summer the same pattern plays out at my bench: big storm Tuesday night, dead computers Wednesday morning. Some of those machines just need a power supply. Some of them arrive with the only copy of a business's books or a family's photos on a drive that will never spin again. The difference between those two outcomes is almost never luck — it's whether a backup existed. Here's how to be on the right side of that before the next front rolls through.
A voltage spike coming through the wall can cook a hard drive's controller board outright — the drive powers on to a dead board, or doesn't power on at all. Just as often, the damage is subtler: the surge or the instant blackout after it interrupts the drive mid-write, corrupting the file system, or the heads don't park cleanly. SSDs aren't immune either; their controllers and power circuitry take surges badly, and an SSD that dies tends to die completely rather than limping. Desktops plugged straight into the wall are the most exposed, but laptops on charge during a strike come in too.
Worth saying plainly: the $12 power strip clamps one big surge and then quietly stops protecting anything, with no way to tell from the outside. A quality surge protector is worth having and worth replacing every few years. A UPS — a battery backup — is better still, because it gives your computer time to shut down cleanly instead of dying mid-write. But neither one is a backup. They protect the hardware. They do nothing about the other ways data dies: ransomware, theft, spilled coffee, plain old drive age. Only a copy of your data protects your data.
Every solid backup plan is a version of the same idea: three copies of your data, on two different types of storage, with one copy somewhere else. The computer itself is copy one. The whole game is copies two and three.
If you've been comparing data backup and recovery in NJ, the options come down to four, and each has a catch:
Skip the acronyms and answer two questions. How much work can you afford to lose? If losing a day of invoices is survivable, nightly backups are fine; if losing an hour hurts, you need continuous backup. How long can you afford to be down? A retail shop that can limp along on a tablet is different from an office where six people bill hourly. Those two answers — not a product brochure — determine what to buy, and they're the conversation behind properly designed data backup and recovery services in NJ rather than a checkbox "we have backups" setup.
Half the backup failures I see aren't missing backups — they're backups nobody ever tested. The external drive that filled up in 2024. The cloud agent that's been erroring silently for months. The NAS backing up an empty folder. Once a quarter, pick a file and actually restore it. Five minutes, and it converts "I think we're backed up" into "I know we are."
If a surge took a drive down and there was no backup, don't compound it: power the machine off, and if Windows offers to "initialize" or format the disk, say no — that offer destroys recoverable data. Surge-damaged drives are one of the more recoverable failure types when they're handled early, and I've laid out exactly what data recovery actually costs. When you're ready, bring the drive to my Somerville bench for surge-damaged drive data recovery — an evaluation and a straight answer before you spend a dollar — and once your files are back, we'll set up the backup that makes next summer's storms boring.
Want your backup checked before the next storm instead of after? Call 908-428-9558 — it's a short conversation, and it's a lot cheaper than the alternative.