First, the company has redundant servers in its headquarters offices, and second, all the data is backed up to tape at an off-site location in a bank vault across San Francisco Bay, Perry said. The third part of the security plan requires all workers to use removable external hard drives, while the final disaster recovery system is what Perry called a "doomsday book" -- a laptop with a 100GB drive and enough batteries to run the business for about a day. The laptop is taken off-site each day.

Perry acknowledged that the strategy may not keep the company running through major disasters. "Most of the stuff I worry about in terms of real-time recovery are small kinds of disasters," he said, adding that during "big-time disasters, I tend to think we would be off-line for more than the amount of time that having instantaneous recovery requires."