Not just a DR Plan Anymore

Every now and then you come across something that changes the way you do everything. I just got the latest release of Camtasia Studio and man is it great. It's got some cool new features that I'll let the website go into details on, but what I wanted to talk about is how this kind of thing can be used in our environments. I sat down last night and made a video of the restore procedure for one of our ETL processe

Every now and then you come across something that changes the way you do everything. I just got the latest release of Camtasia Studio and man is it great. It's got some cool new features that I'll let the website go into details on, but what I wanted to talk about is how this kind of thing can be used in our environments.

I sat down last night and made a video of the restore procedure for one of our ETL processes. It was 10mins long, and it explained everything someone would need to know to recover the process from a crash. So why can't you use this same thing to record your DR strategy? Think about it... would you rather sift through tons of documents or watch a video and see exactly what you need to do, and do it at the same time. This way you can also have the important things explained to you.

I know you can attach files to your LiteSpeed backup files. This is mainly to be able to keep the DR documentation with the backup so it can't get lost. So, why not attach a video file of the system being restored instead? I hope I can see a day in the future when vendors have basic help files with video links so you can easily see how to do something. Sure, it's going to increase the size fo the help files, but its usefullness more than takes care of that.

Actually, for those of you who were at http://www.sqlpass.org/ a couple weeks ago, you'll remember the demo of Vista help. It will actually perform the requested action for you, and show you how it's doing it along the way so you can learn. That's not only cooler than cool, it's really where I hope vendors start taking their help programs. Until then though, Camtasia is an excellent medium for this sort of thing.

So use Camtasia for your DR plans. Use it for your other documentation purposes too. If you have a document explaining how to run a process or how to fix something... make a quick video of it in Camtasia and give the users something really useful to refer to (to which to refer).

Of course it's not going to work for everything, but you'd be surprised how useful it can be for a majority of things.

I already use it in SSIS when I document my package processes. If there's something special that has to happen to extend the process or add a package, I Camtasia it. Believe me, it's so much easier than trying to describe all the transformation objects on paper.