Get your server out of the basement — protecting computers and data from NYC floods

New York has learned this lesson more than once. During Hurricane Sandy in 2012, a flooded basement at 75 Broad Street knocked out the fuel pumps for a data center, and staff carried diesel up 17 flights of stairs in buckets to keep it running (Data Center Knowledge). In September 2021, the remnants of Hurricane Ida turned basements in Queens and Brooklyn into deadly traps — the city counted 13 deaths, 11 of them in basement apartments (NYC Comptroller).

People first, always. But once everyone is safe, the next question is usually: was the only copy of everything in that basement?

Where we keep finding equipment

• The modem and router on the floor behind the couch.
• A NAS or “server” on the bottom shelf of a storage closet.
• The back-office PC that holds QuickBooks, sitting on the floor under a desk.
• A box of old hard drives with every family photo since 2005 — in the basement.

The fix, in order

1. Get it up. Move equipment at least a few feet off the floor — a shelf, a wall mount, or a different room upstairs. This alone saves most equipment in a minor flood.
2. Get a copy out. Set up an automatic, versioned offsite backup so your files exist somewhere water can't reach. If your only backup sits next to the computer, it floods with the computer.
3. Move what you can to the cloud. Shared office files often belong in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace rather than on a box in the basement — with a separate backup of those cloud accounts too.
4. Add a water sensor. A $20 leak sensor near equipment can send an alert to your phone at 3 a.m.
5. Put it on a UPS. Storms bring outages and surges. (Our UPS guide)
6. Photograph your equipment and keep receipts in the cloud — insurance claims go much faster.

If your equipment already got wet

• Don't turn it on. Powering up wet electronics is how a recoverable drive becomes unrecoverable.
• Unplug it from the wall (only if it's safe to reach the outlet — never stand in water near electricity).
• Don't put it in rice, and don't use a hair dryer.
• Get the drive to a technician quickly. Corrosion starts within days.

When to call a tech

We'll walk your home or office, move what needs moving, set up offsite backups, and test a restore so you know it works. Want to see the difference first? Run a basement flood in the Crash Test — once with your setup, once with ours.