We all know we have to backup our data, small or big. I once myself lost 120GB worth of data when my hard-drive crashed.
Have you ever experienced the frustration when you accidently deleted a file and realised you had no backup of it? Imagine that happening to all email, files, settings, movies, music, contacts of a whole company.
Last year I was called in to look at a major issue for a Business who was not our client. When I arrived, I initially thought one of the server’s multiple RAIDED hard drives had crashed and just needed to be replaced. (Raid System is where the hard drive replicates its data across multiple hard drives) Normally just replacing the failed hard drive would work just fine and save the whole company.
To my surprise, the whole of RAID array was damaged and all hard drives were corrupt, and needed to be replaced. So the backup tapes the company was using had to be relied on to restore the data.
So I turned to the person who was in charge of handling the daily tapes. It was a dismal situation; I was informed by him that he had not bothered to put in tapes for at least a month. This meant after I got the new hard drives and the array up and running the latest data I could recover from was over a month old.
This is a common scenario I faced at this site; happening on a regular basis.
I lastly restored much of their server but a month’s worth of work was lost because of poor backup administration. Over the years we at Get IT Here have seen this happen to many businesses, so we decided to come up with an inexpensive solution where we leave little gap for human error and setup a robust backup system which runs more frequently, then once a day.
Our plan was to come up with a system where the business does not have to appoint anyone to look after changing tapes while still having a secure offsite backup done on a regular basis. We also had to pay close attention to the load put upon the server or network while trying to run backups too frequently.
As magical as it sounds we did come up with a solution, we put in a huge server at a remote, secure location. The client’s servers backup to this remote server on an hourly basis, in return giving us the most latest restore point in case of a disaster. The system also notified us and the company when a backup failed for any reason.
Imagine your business hitting a disaster and the most you lost was an hour’s work compared to a day’s, week’s or a month’s!
I do not want to sound like an Infomercial in my blog but seriously, are you asking the right questions to your IT people? Questions like:
- Is there a Disaster plan for my company?
- How is my backup setup?
- How reliable are tapes?
- If disaster strikes, how behind will we get?
- Is there a second person who checks your backups if the appointed person forgets to?
