All I want for Christmas is a Good Backup

I saw a dental commercial the other day that advised people to "Only floss the teeth you want to keep." I thought that was concise and clever and we can tweak that to "Only backup the data you want to keep."

 What does that mean for you and your business? Unfortunately it's not always an easy answer since you have to look at a number of different factors in order to devise a suitable disaster recovery strategy.

Here are the most important. What do you consider to be an acceptable loss? Can you lose a day's worth of data, an hour, a week. This is different for each business and you need to look at how much effort it would take to recreate the lost information. For some small companies if you can recover your QuickBooks data, your emails and the word and excel documents from your profile everything is fine. Others have Exchange and SQL databases, customized templates, shared calendars and contacts lists that could cost a business many thousands of dollars and may even mean the business closing its door for good in a worst case scenario. Spread that across several locations and the complexity quickly multiplies.

Another consideration is how long can you afford to be down. A good backup is great and it's always a relief to know that even though your server has died but you have a good, current backup but how is your business going to be impacted while the issues are being rectified. Will it cost you thousands of dollars an hour to be down? If that's the case then you should probably have a backup server or a cluster ready to come online. Can you wait a week for a replacement to arrive and be configured. You need to think about this before the failure because at that point it's too late.

Multiple points of failure, that phrase is so important I'm going to repeat it. Multiple points of failure. Nothing is fool proof and that includes your backup system. The only thing worse than not having a backup and knowing it is thinking you have a backup but really don't. I've seen folks who have just plugged a USB drive into their computer and run a scheduled nightly backup and assume that's a good solution. I assure you it is not. It is susceptible to many of the same losses that your working data is. A fire, virus, power surge, disk failure, data corruption and program failure can all wipe out your working data and backup data. You must have a solution that includes multiple physical media that are off site.

So what do we recommend? For our average business customer it includes several layers of protection. A semiannual sever image to allow for rapid recovery of the server and settings without the need for a complete re-install combined with a nightly tape backup with 5 to 10 tapes in rotation and one to several taken off site either daily or weekly. You also need to verify that you can recover. A test restore is vital to be certain that your system is functioning properly. If you haven't restored anything from your backup then how can you be certain it is there. You have to be honest with yourself and if you are likely to forget to take tapes or drives off site then an online solution might be the right solution for you. I encourage you to try ours for free for a month, http://ionnetworking.onlinebackupsolution.com/. Businesses change and you must perform a review annually and after every major system change to make sure that your backup strategy is still valid and reflects the changes to your system.

As you can see setting up the right backup strategy might not be easy but the time you spend to get it right could pay off in a big way and of course we're happy to help you plan and implement the right solution for you. Have a great holiday and happy computing.