So a lot of you have asked me “What’s your deal with lightning?”
Well, my wife and I have a nice shower in the master bath. It’s rather large, white tile, gold fixtures, nothing real fancy, just run of the mill nice, sitting next to a large tub below a frosted arched window.
Like a lot of people that grew up in North Texas, we are concerned and like to keep an eye on the weather, fully aware that Mother Nature can put on quite a nice show.
So, how is our shower and the weather related? Several years ago on a beautiful sunny late afternoon, we were watching an impressive thunderstorm approaching from many miles to the west. Then, out of the blue, we suddenly experienced a blinding flash and violent explosion, one that would forever change our lives.
The lightning ran through a tree, hit the gutter on the northeast corner of the house, ran sixty feet down the gutter and blasted through our frosted arched bathroom window on the north side of the house, arced across the bathroom hitting our gold shower head, traveled throughout our copper plumbing in the concrete foundation and blasted out of the south side of the house, leaving in its wake, water pouring out of the south side of the house and fire burning on the north side of the house.
Within an instant, we went from sitting on the sofa on the west side of the house to standing next to the front door on the east side of the house. We have no memory of moving from one place to another. Our teen aged son rounded the hallway corner headed to the front door at full speed, fleeing flying sparks and what appeared to be plasma floating through his bedroom.
The engineer and lightning specialist assigned to evaluate the extensive damage sustained by our house several weeks after the strike ventured the likelyhood that our house was hit by a form of lightning called “a bolt from the blue” or “positive lightning” a highly damaging and dangerous form of lightning “typically six to ten times more powerful” than normal lightning.
There’s plenty more to the story, but lets just say that almost a year passed before we could move back into our home. That fatefull lightning strike took out all of our personal computing equipment containing the current project proposals and work inquiries I was working on.
All of my years of preaching about data backups and recovery methods came back to me in full force. Fate handed me the ultimate data recovery operation, all of our personal business.
The second bit of good news regarding the entire lightening experience arrived when I completed the recovery operation the very next evening without a single bit of lost data. Even the project that I walked away from, to watch the beautiful approaching thunderstorm, was fully recoverable thanks to CDP, Continual Data Protection.
The first bit of good news arrived moments after the strike when we realized all three of us survived this unbelievable event alive.
That’s my deal with lightning! Are you sure your backup works?
