HATTIE: But first let's look at securing our data from natural disasters.

VICKY CARLSON: We have always backed up our systems. During the fires I thought, wow, it's been awhile since I've been in touch with the actual details of what happens with our system. I called our VP of operations and I said, "Ron, do we have our tape? I know we back up, but do we have it secure? Do I need to go to the office and get it?" He said, no, it's our policy to remove that tape every night. I didn't want my place to burn down but if it did, at least I could recreate my customer orders. It would be devastating if I couldn't.

HATTIE: How many years ago did you start taking the tape home every night?

BRIAN JACOBSEN: It's been about 10 years. 10 years every night? Yeah

HATTIE: Mr. Discipline.

BRIAN: And, we check the backups to make sure they are good backups every night.

HATTIE: (voiceover) Brian Jacobsen and Glen Bieley of Seattle-based Madison Park Greeting and Vicky Carlson, owner of San Diego's Office Pavilion, never leave the valuable data stored in their computers to chance.

VICKY: Office Pavilion is an office furniture dealership. That's a little word for a lot of things. We have space planners who will go in and work with the customers to lay out the space do programming to understand how they work, what kind of environment they have so that we can create a solution of products to fit within their environment -- their space--- that works with their culture.

GLEN BIELEY: Our niche is selling high end products to fine independent stores. We do that both through our own product line, Madison Park Greetings and through our strategic partnerships with other publishers in the industry that previously ran their own companies and now have folded their operations into our headquarters here in Seattle. We run those companies under their own brands and they keep the creative control.

HATTIE: Do you remember when this company did not have a computer?

BRIAN: I remember my mother doing invoices at home by hand after dinner and sending them out and having a little card file for people who had paid and for people who had not paid.

GLEN: And that is something we talk about a lot. Technology. Five six seven years ago we said let's make sure that we would continue to invest in that pretty aggressively so we keep upgrading our systems.

VICKY: When we first started on the computers it was a revolution in our industry to help streamline our processes and start cutting the time down. We thought, oh my, we never want to go back to tallying up the parts and pieces. That brings you to the question: How safe are these computers? Pretty new for us. You know, how safe is the data?