6 Data Back Up Strategies for a nearly Fail-proof Business

If you are not backing up data, all data, then take these first steps to ensure your information will be available to you when you need it. Too often, small businesses don’t back up their information at all or with any regularity and simply rely on their servers and desktop computers to always work. The cold hard reality is both computers and servers fail on a regular basis (A study conducted by Bianca Schroeder and Garth A. Gibson, Carnegie Mellon University, indicated a common drive failure occurrence rate of 2-4% and up to 13% for some systems) and when that failure day comes, is when we typically get “the” call. “Can you restore my data?”

It’s true, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The cost to protect your business in the event of hardware failure is minutely small in comparison to trying to either recapture lost data or recreate lost data altogether. We know, we’ve seen it time and again. Imagine the effort it would take to recreate even one week’s worth of work and the frustration it would cause you and your associates.

If you have RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) set up, that is a good first step, however, all you have really done is to protect yourself from drive failure. You have not protected yourself from either server failure or accidental deletion of files. Furthermore, most instances where RAID is deployed only accounts for the server data and not information stored on individual workstations themselves. A solid defensive strategy needs to consider all data from all sources in your environment.

The forgotten data is regularly at the desktop level and is very difficult to recover. A server may be backing up all data shared on it, but does not incorporate much of the work created on our personal PCs. Many tools are available to nearly eliminate this common issue but continues to be overlooked as far as data recovery is concerned.

Too often, we are brought into situations where regular backups appear to be working when in actuality, the data being captured as a business continuity safeguard has been compromised. Typically this occurs because the initial backup protocol that has been established either fails or the back-up requirements change, making the data-set virtually useless. At the very least the costs for reintegrating the data back into your organization is ridiculously high and needlessly so.

Nearly Fail-Proof Back Up Solutions:

 1.  Layer in as much redundancy as your operation can afford

 2.  Establish a back-up standard which includes desktop level

 3.  Automate a backup response

 4.  Check your backup or have it checked regularly (once per week)

 5.  Plan at least one restore of back-up data every 3 months and confirm it has functioned properly

 6.  Review your back-up standards yearly