I’ve been supporting small business computers and network systems for more than 25 years, and believe me when I say, the number one thing that still boggles my mind is the lack of sound backup systems and procedures.
It is a topic we cover a lot in our newsletters, and for good reason: Not a month goes by where we aren’t witness to some sort of catastrophic file loss or system/server failure.
If you’ve ever lost an hour of work on your PC because it locked up in the middle of writing a proposal, you know the grief it causes. Now imagine if you lost days or weeks of work – or imagine losing your client database, financial records, and all of the work files your company has ever produced or compiled.
Or what if a major storm, flood, or fire destroyed your office and all of your files? It’s raining as I write this, perhaps the twentieth day of rain in the last 30, and we’re under a flood watch yet again.
One of our biggest concerns is a virus wiping out your server or holding your data hostage, like Crypto Locker does. Do you have an emergency recovery plan in place that you feel confident in? How quickly do you think you could recover, if at all?
If you don’t have good answers to these questions, you’re quite literally playing Russian Roulette with your business.
We had a client recently who uses a network attached storage device, similar to a server, to store hundreds of gigabytes of data. It is a redundant system in that it uses RAID to protect from single hard drive failures.
Unfortunately during a recent storm, their office was struck by lightning, damaging a lot of things, including the storage system. While the system had internal redundancies, the client had no offsite backup of the data.
We ended up having to send the business’ hard drives to a data recovery specialist. The final bill to recover his data was over $5,000. That doesn’t include the cost of a week’s worth of downtime.
Tape backup? No way!
If you’re confident in your antiquated tape backup system, keep in mind tape-based systems have a failure rate of 100%. Incredible, isn’t it? Most people don’t realize that all tape drives fail at some point.
What’s really dangerous is that most companies won’t realize it happened until it’s too late, because they never perform test restores.
Thousands of businesses lose millions of dollars worth of data to disasters like fires, power outages, theft, equipment failure, and even simple human error. In almost every case, these businesses had some type of backup system in place, but were horrified to find out it wasn’t working when they needed it most.
My point is this: We see the threats against your network, data and business constantly growing. It isn’t a matter of “if” you will have a problem, but rather a matter of “when.” We have many options to protect your systems from viruses and back up your data. Give us a call to evaluate your backup and disaster recovery situation.