Storm

As frightening as that photograph may be, the simple truth is less than 1% of data losses are a result of natural disaster. Unfortunately that leaves the other 99% of things to worry about.

Our specialists will consult with you and create a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery plan that will allow your business to survive ANY eventuality. This service is an included part of our all-inclusive flat fee Comprehensive I.T. Support services, and is also available as a stand alone service.


Forming a Disaster Recovery Plan

  • Define what “Disaster” means—losing a single word document file is not a disaster. Losing your entire customer database including your accounts receivable records is probably not a disaster if your backups are reasonably current and the hardware is intact. A major fire that destroys your system hardware and all the data on your system clearly qualifies as a disaster. Determine what constitutes a disaster and the steps that will be taken when a disaster is declared.
  • How much will you lose per hour of downtime—this is extremely difficult to quantify. Clearly there may be lost revenue, however it goes beyond dollars. How much will your customer good-will suffer while your system is down?
  • Determine your recovery window—stated another way, how long can you survive without your data? If the answer is only a few hours and your hardware is destroyed, you must have access to a disaster recovery system while you acquire new hardware.
Loss

Any good disaster recovery plan begins with a good backup plan.

Seven Critical Components of a Good Backup Plan

  1. Central storage of data on the network—although it may seem counter intuitive, as much of your critical data as possible should reside in one place on your network. This includes mission critical application data, Exchange Server database files, crucial customer database files, and local PC “mydocs” files, to name a few. It is far simpler to backup, restore and protect one machine and one location than several. Plus, there is a side benefit; physical and network access to that machine (and therefore to critical and perhaps sensitive data) can more easily be restricted, improving security.
  2. Multiple Backups—the saying goes, “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” There are several valid reasons for multiple backups:
    • A single backup may fail.
    • In the case of accidental deletion, data loss is often noticed days after it occurred, which means if your only backup is from last night, you have no way of retrieving your data.
    • Restoring files that were intentionally deleted months or even years ago, when you thought you would NEVER need them again, can often be of great benefit.
  3. Off-Site backups—if your office burns down, you don’t want your backups to burn with it, so it’s important to physically move some of your backups off-site. With the advent of broadband internet and off-site backup and restore services this can be done automatically with 256-bit encryption technology (extremely secure).
  4. Retention period—there are an increasing number of industry specific regulations regarding data retention periods. It is incumbent upon any business owner to be aware of the laws that dictate their data preservation. Any backup plan must account for legally mandated data retention periods.
  5. Monitoring—if you need to restore a file or your entire system, the time to learn that the backup is unusable is not when you attempt a restoration. You need to be sure that your backups are successfully completed and immediately available when needed.
  6. Follow the plan—if you are using tapes or removable hard drives, you will need to remember to change these regularly on the backup schedule you are following. Neglecting to do this could cause the backup to fail or could result in an important previous backup being overwritten. It is also important that you insert the right media; having the June 4 backup data on the January 15 tape would make the right data very difficult to find.
  7. Regular file list updating—the files selected for backup when you first initiate a backup procedure will not be the same files that need to be backed up a year later. There must be constant monitoring of the files that are included in any backup.