Perhaps it's not a coincidence that the September National Preparedness Month is followed by National Cyber Security Awareness Month. Organized by the National Cyber Security Alliance, it aims to educate users in the home, business, and school environments about healthy and secure computing habits.

As a follow-up to our earlier post on The Wall Street Journal's recent review of Windows 7, we'd also like to offer the following links to other relevant and interesting articles and reviews. You might be want to check them out if you're weighing whether or not to switch when it becomes available on October 22:

Have you checked out TechSoup's new Disaster Planning and Recovery Toolkit? We've updated and expanded our downloadable book, The Resilient Organization: A Guide for Disaster Planning and Recovery, and hosted two webinars on disaster planning.

If you've used any of these resources, it's time to let us know what you thought and how we could improve. Please take three minutes to respond to our very short survey. This is your chance to tell us what you think of the toolkit and what resources we should add to it.

As a part of the disaster campaign, we've been blogging about disaster planning and recovery over the past few weeks:

• Free Webinars: National Preparedness Month: Did you know that September is National Preparedness Month? Agility Recovery Solutions, a disaster recovery specialist, together with FEMA, is hosting a series of weekly webinars this month.
• Pangea Foundation's Disaster Relief Communications Hub: ReliefPoint is "a real-time communications hub for national disaster relief coordination and information dissemination." Pangea Foundation developed the tool in response to the October 2007 wildfires that destroyed land and homes in and around San Diego.
• Mobile Phones and Disaster Planning: Cell phones and "smartphones" are easily the greatest additions to accessible emergency preparedness and disaster response. Actively helping staff and volunteers to program their phones will directly and immediately increase their personal as well as your organization's preparedness.
• Freestore Foodbank: Standardized Practices and Disaster Planning: Learn how one organization's overhaul of its tech infrastructure made it ready when a disaster came.
• Back That Mac Up: Isn't Time Machine enough? Maybe not. Learn how to back up your Mac computers and recover them quickly in the case of hard drive damage or failure.

Photo: Random McRandomhead, CC license

Earlier this year, we hosted the first Microsoft-TechSoup Show Your Impact Story Contest and I wandted to take a moment to highlight one of the winners. Elliot blogged about another one of the winners last week. As you may have noticed, we've been writing tooklits and guides, conducting webinars, and blogging about different ways to plan and prepare for disasters and emergencies over the past couple of weeks.

This is, in part, because September is National Preparedness Month. It's also in part because it's around this time of year that the news is full of warnings about hurricanes and wildfires and we want to do our part to make sure that nonprofits and libaries have resources especially for them.

Despite the fear that talking about a major natural disaster might evoke, the resources we've been developing and sharing are really intended to help ensure that your organization can be resilient and flexible — able to adapt to any situation quickly, whether it's an emergency or an opportunity.

One such resource, is a project of the Pangea Foundation, one of the winners of that contest I mentioned earlier. They developed something called ReliefPoint, "a real-time communications hub for national disaster relief coordination and information dissemination." They initially created it in response to the October 2007 wildfires that destroyed land and homes in and around San Diego.

Initially, the region relied on all-centers in order to communicate that status of the fires to various agencies, news affiliates, and community members, but they found it to still take too long to get the information turned around. As an alternative, Pangea created (in 3 days) a hub that provided:

Ana-Marie Jones is the Executive Director of CARD - Collaborating Agencies Responding to Disasters, a nonprofit located in Alameda County, California. Created by local community agencies after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, CARD trains and supports nonprofits and their special needs clients in disaster preparedness, response, and recovery activities. CARD has been a TechSoup partner for developing The Resilient Organization: A Guide for Disaster Planning and Recovery, a new 77-page manual for nonprofits to prevent and recover from any disaster.

Cell phones and "smartphones" are easily the greatest additions to accessible emergency preparedness and disaster response. Virtually any nonprofit can dramatically increase its level of emergency preparedness and planning efficiency by embracing cell phone technology. Since many employees, volunteers and consumers already carry cell phones, this approach doesn't necessarily require buying anything new. If the phones are already familiar to the user, little time will be needed to  teach new technology, and the tech support systems for cell phones is readily accessible — in stores, via phone, and online. Remember that even if the reception and signal fail, the programmed information is still available!

Among the most useful ways to embrace the cell phone solution is to dedicate a few minutes at staff meetings and gatherings to help program phones. Have people pull them out and enter these numbers and information immediately. Some of the most basic things to program include:

If you haven't already, check out TechSoup's new Disaster Planning and Recovery Toolkit. In addition to our free book, The Resilient Organization: A Guide for Disaster Planning and Recovery, you'll also find webinars, articles, and links to other information around the Internet. We think that this toolkit can be a great resource for organizations in times of health as well as those facing disasters.

A point that we emphasize throughout the book is that disaster planning isn't just a matter of being ready for a natural disaster. It's about rethinking the way your organization works and adopting technologies and procedures that emphasize flexibility and adaptability throughout your organization. An organization that's ready for a disaster is also ready for a new opportunity to expand its impact when a need arises.

I can't think of a story that better illustrates this concept than that of the Freestore Foodbank in Cincinnati, one of the winners of our Microsoft Show Your Impact contest.

Freestore Foodbank serves over 7000 individuals a month in the greater Cincinnati area, and those numbers double in November and December. Before undergoing a major overhaul of their tech infrastructure, the Foodbank’s multiple branches had a lot of trouble communicating and working together, both internally and externally. In making major infrastructural improvements and standardizing practices across all of their branches, the Foodbank was able to serve the community more swiftly; what's more, when one branch was struck by a natural disaster, the Foodbank was ready for it.

This post is mainly for Mac users. If you're not a Mac user, many of the points here will still apply to you, but some of them won't. You might prefer this video of a dog eating Potato Olés.

If you haven't already, check out our new guide, The Resilient Organization: A Guide for Disaster Planning and Recovery. This book represents several months' worth of research and numerous people's expertise, and we think it'll be a helpful resource for nonprofits and public libraries.

Working on the book got me thinking about my own backup strategies for my home computer. About two years ago, my old iBook G4 started to get slow and it seemed that the hard drive was probably on its way out. I was still covered by AppleCare at the time, so I bought an external MyBook drive and downloaded SuperDuper, in hopes that I'd still be under warranty when the internal drive inevitably died. No such luck.

Like most backup programs, SuperDuper gives you the choice of whether to back up only your own personal data (your home folder) or your entire drive, including the operating system and applications. To back up the entire drive, select "Backup - all files." (This is often referred to as a mirror image.) The benefit of this sort of backup is that if you need to, you can boot the computer from it. That's a huge plus for a lot of reasons: if something happens to your internal drive, you can still boot from the external drive. If you need to send the computer to the shop, you can boot from your backup drive on a separate Mac and keep working as usual.

Does your organization have a plan to keep your technology, data, and assets protected in the event of an emergency or disaster? What if it's not an actual disaster like a hurricane or flood, but a staff member simply loses or breaks a laptop carrying essential supporter data? How much time or money might your organization spend trying to recover even a fraction of what's been lost? If these questions have crossed your mind and your answers are less than ideal, you should join us for our two-part webinar series on disaster planning to protect your technology.

Join me on Thursday, August 20 at 11 a.m. Pacific as I interview nonprofit tech expert Chris Shipley from Nutmeg Consulting and Elliot Harmon, TechSoup staff writer and editor of our soon-to-be-released The Resilient Organization: A Guide for Disaster Planning and Recovery. We'll also be joined by Michelle Baldwin, Executive Director of Volunteers in Service to Others, which runs the Cooke County emergency food bank. They experienced a flood two years ago and she'll be offering advice for other nonprofits trying to plan ahead.

If you send mass email messages, you probably see a lot of bouncebacks that look like this:

Remote host said: 550 SC-004 Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons.

So what the heck does bounce code "550 SC-004" mean? The Email Experience Council's Deliverability Roundtable (Chris Wheeler of Bronto Software, Jack Sinclair of Return Path, and Josh Baer of OtherInbox) has put together a list of common email bounce codes to help decode why your emails might not be making it to their intended recipients.

Photo: Balakov 

Have you ever checked out TechSoup's Disaster Planning and Recovery Toolkit? It's a good place to turn for any organization whose tech infrastructure has suffered a disaster, natural or otherwise. We're overhauling the manual and toolkit, and we need your help!

If you have ten minutes to spare, please take our Emergency Preparedness Survey for Nonprofits and Public Libraries. Even if you haven't been impacted by a disaster, your input is still important. We want to learn what steps organizations are going through to protect their computers and data, even if they've been fortunate enough not to experience a disaster.

The survey is completely confidential, but if you are interested in sharing more information, we're also looking for people to interview about their own experiences in disaster preparation and recovery. The survey will give you the opportunity to express your interest in further participation.

We will select one respondent at random to receive a $25 Amazon.com gift certificate. Respond by July 10 to be eligible for the drawing. Please forward this survey to your colleagues at nonprofits, NGOs, or libraries. The survey is open to organizations anywhere in the world.

Photo: Random McRandomhead, CC license