I’m always amazed at the difference in attitudes to backups. Some small businesses are fanatical yet others I’ve come across, at least it seems, couldn’t care less. Most, however, are somewhere in between – they see the importance of having good backups but it can be a pain rotating backup media and storing it off-site.
Online backup will probably be the best solution in the longer term but at the moment, if you have any serious amount of data, the price can be prohibitive. There is also the issue of being able to quickly retrieve a large backup in the event of a complete system failure – who wants to be waiting for a disk to arrive by post when they are in a business down situation?
Backups are an insurance policy and from a disaster recovery point of view we want to be making sure that we have all bases covered. All too often I come across people just backing up My Documents folders, accounts data and other individual folders. In reality this isn’t enough and they are invariably missing important data from their backup routines. To be completely sure it’s a good bet to back up the entire system using a solution that allows bare-metal restore.
Once we have a backup system in place it’s important to check the validity of backups and periodically test to make sure that we can restore the data. In the past I came across a decent sized company that were very careful to make sure they changed their backup tapes every day and stored them off-site. It later turned out that the backup hadn’t actually worked since the day it was set up over three years previous. They were more than a little miffed with their old IT provider. Fortunately for them they didn’t have a system failure in that time. They’re now very glad that we check their backup every day as part of our service.
I think that in general, for the time being at least, the best option is to backup to local USB drives which are then rotated to off-site storage or replicated to online storage. We recommend the following to our clients as a minimum:
- Backup software that allows bare-metal restore
- Daily backups to local USB drives
- A minimum of 5 drives, changed daily and stored off-site / or a single drive with off-site replication of data
At the end of the day it’s up to you which backup system you choose to implement. Hopefully you’ll never need to call on it, but if you do, you’d better be sure it will be up to the task of getting your business back on the road.
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