How could have the Bhopal disaster been prevented?

Has your business survived a disaster (e.g. fire, flood, theft)? How did you do it and how have you prevented it happening again?

• Looking for tips to help small businesses to better protect themselves, any thoughts/experiences/advice would be appreciated. I'll be collating them into a guide for business owners so contributors will be praised, promoted and generally admired!

• Answer:

  I came into the office one morning to discover that everything had been stolen. 5 sets of PC's and printers. That was a bummer. The idiots however failed to realise that the triathlon bikes in the back room were worth more than $10,000 (Cervelo P3 with sub 9 & powertap etc etc etc ). So by 0930 I was at the local computer hardware store maxing out the credit card. 10:30 computers set up. Linked one computer into Dropbox with a selective sync. Used another computer to download key software. (A third torrented some stuff as we couldn't find the disks) 11:30 most software reinstalled. 12:00 basic operations resumed. It took a few more days to get everything working totally smoothly. We had about 80GB of data to download and sync across the computers and that was way more than our broadband link could support. USB drives were key in helping that. Whilst we didn't have a disaster recovery plan written down I'd written them for a billion dollar company before and we'd basically designed all our systems on the basis that we should be able to lose all our hardware and be up and running fast. It worked The hardest things were the passwords. These were kept in a software vault and until we'd downloaded the app and the data file we weren't able to access much as most were 20+ random character strings and not written down. Those are now available by iPad though. Recently though we lost our last company credit card and cancelling it was a nightmare as so much stuff started falling over when it got declined. We actually spent more Tim on that than the theft.