Use technical writers to prepare for disaster

In late 2025, a Japanese beer maker was forced to halt all operations in 30 factories after being hit by a cyber attack. A few weeks later, all of its facilities in Japan - including six breweries - [had] partially reopened, its computer systems [were] still down. As the article notes, the company had to revert to process[ing] orders and shipments manually - using pen, paper and fax machines - resulting in much fewer shipments than before the attack.

Reverting to paper seems to be an expected way to respond to disasters like this one. After all, if the computers are down, that means you can't take orders. And more importantly, and maybe not as visibly, your teams can't access their documentation.

But that last one is where your technical writer can help you. Technical writers are skilled at writing documentation and organizing information, such as by making books. Think about it, a lot of technical writers end up writing material for training courses, like training workbooks. We know how to make format content into book interiors. It's what we do.

That's where technical writers can play an important role:

Print the content

The most reliable way to protect your critical documentation is to make a hardcopy—that is, print it on paper. Don't go to town on this, you don't have to put this into a special format like crown quarto or trade paperback. Your documentation is probably already captured in Word documents, in US letter size (8 1/2 by 11) so use that.

It's a big job, but one you can do internally without having to outsource it. Start by printing the documentation to one of your company's big, heavy duty office printers. Use 3-hole punch paper if you can, that will save some time in the next step.

Organize the information

Then, collect that information into 3-ring binders. This doesn't need to be fancy, just get them into the binders, and add separator pages where needed.

Probably the best way to organize this is to put all the IT teams' documentation into one binder, the sales teams' documentation into another binder, and so on. If you need further organization within each binder, use separator pages. These don't need to be fancy either, handwritten separator pages will do the job.

Make an electronic copy too

While paper is excellent, you can more easily distribute electronic copies of documentation. Binders are big and heavy, and it can be a chore to update them (even if you do it only once a quarter).

As a backup to the backup, you should also make electronic copies. An EPUB would be ideal, but a quick way to make an electronic copy is to export the documentation to PDF format, and save them to a USB flash drive. Distribute copies of the flash drive to whoever needs them: make one copy of the documentation for IT, another copy for sales, and so on.

I also recommend making it quickly obvious when that USB flash drive was generated. Putting everything into a Q2 2026 folder on the flash drive is not a bad solution, for example.