Hurricane season officially starts June 1. If you live in the Orlando area, you already know what the next six months can look like sudden afternoon storms, multi-day power outages, surges that take out half a neighborhood's electronics. The good news: with about an hour of prep this week, you can keep almost all of it from touching your computer or the data on it.
Why Florida storms are uniquely brutal on home computers
Three things make Florida's storm season the most dangerous time of year for your PC: voltage surges, sustained humidity, and multi-day outages.
A nearby lightning strike can send a voltage spike traveling through your home's electrical wiring fast enough to fry a motherboard before a cheap power strip even reacts. Even when the power simply blinks off and on what utility folks call a "glitch" that's still enough to corrupt a drive that was mid-write. And when power stays out for days, humidity creeping into a closed-up house can quietly corrode contacts inside computers that "made it through fine."
We see all three failure modes from June through November here in Orlando. The most heartbreaking calls aren't the ones about hardware though. They're about photos, business records, and decades of family memories that lived on one drive and only one drive.
Step 1. Back up everything this week, not when the storm has a name
The cheapest, most important step costs almost nothing and protects you against every other failure on this list.
Pick the easiest backup option you'll actually use: an external drive plugged into your PC, a free Google Drive or OneDrive account, or a paid cloud backup service like Backblaze. Whatever you choose, follow the 3-2-1 rule: three copies of your important files, on two different types of media, with one copy off-site.
For most home users, that translates to: your computer's main drive (copy 1), an external USB drive (copy 2), and a free cloud account (copy 3, off-site). The cloud copy is the one that survives a tree-through-the-roof scenario.
Whatever you do, don't wait until the National Hurricane Center names a storm. Those last 72 hours are exactly when cloud uploads get slow and external drives are sold out at Best Buy.
Step 2. Get a real surge protector or better, a UPS
That $5 power strip from the gas station isn't a surge protector. A real one has a joule rating (look for at least 1,000 joules), an indicator light that tells you if it's still functional, and ideally a connected-equipment warranty.
Even better is a UPS Uninterruptible Power Supply. It's basically a surge protector with a small battery built in. When the power blinks or goes out, your computer keeps running for a few minutes enough time to save your work and shut down cleanly. CyberPower and APC both make solid home units for under $150.
If you've got a desktop, a UPS is one of the highest-ROI upgrades for Florida specifically. We've seen them save countless drives during summer afternoon brownouts.
Step 3. Know your shutdown checklist
When a serious storm is heading your way and there's still power, run through this list before things get sketchy:
- Save and close everything important
- Sync any pending cloud uploads (check Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive)
- Shut down the computer all the way not sleep, not hibernate
- Unplug from the wall (yes, even with a surge protector physical disconnection beats any electronic device)
- Disconnect anything plugged directly into ethernet from the modem/router
- Move the tower or laptop off the floor and away from windows
That last step matters more than people realize. We've recovered drives from PCs that survived hurricane-force winds but drowned in rainwater that came through a window.
Step 4. Elevate hardware, move it inland
If your home office is on a ground floor or near a window-heavy room, take 10 minutes during prep to move computers to a high shelf or an interior closet. Power supplies and motherboards generally survive being moved. They don't survive being submerged.
This is also a good time to grab a few towels, a plastic bin or contractor bag, and put any external drives or backups in it. If anything floods, wrapped components have a much better chance of being recoverable.
Step 5. Know who to call when things go wrong anyway
Sometimes a storm just wins. Surges happen, drives fail, water gets in. When that happens, the worst thing you can do is power the machine on to "see if it still works." Even a small amount of moisture inside a power supply or on a motherboard, combined with power, can turn a fully-recoverable failure into a permanent one.
If your PC takes water or surge damage:
- Unplug it immediately. Don't try to turn it on
- Pull the power supply if you can do it safely (most are 4 screws)
- Open up the case so air can circulate. Don't use a hair dryer
- Get it to a tech as soon as possible every day in a humid Florida house works against recovery
Tech Forge handles emergency mobile data recovery throughout the Orlando area year-round, but during storm season we triage urgent recovery calls fast. If your PC has a story to tell after a storm, we'll come to you and start the work on-site so your machine and your data don't sit in a humid garage for a week.
The most important step is the first one back up your stuff. Storm or no storm, the day your drive fails will be a much worse day if your photos and tax records went with it. Spend an hour this week, and the rest of hurricane season won't keep you up at night.