Backups, Backups, Backups

…You have backups in place, right? Lets start with some simple questions to refine your answer.

1) do you get a report daily that shows that your backups worked?
2) do you check to ensure your backups include the data you need backed up?
3) do you retrieve data from your backups to ensure you can use them?

If you answered yes to all the above questions, congrats, you are one of about 10% of the population. If you answered no to the above questions, you DO NOT have basic backups of your data. Studies show that 70% of the businesses that have a major data loss are out of business within a year, and for the other 30%, there business is badly hurt.

The cost of not having backups. People usually look at how much they will have to pay to retrieve their data when they have a failure, what they don’t look at is how much it costs for having a number of employees not working, or how much ill will you generate with your customers during the outage.

How do you get backups implemented in your company?
1) you must have a hardware backup system usually tape or disk based.
2) you must have a reliable and full featured software to create the backups-don’t use the free software that came with your device.
3) you must have the backups stored off site.

next post I’ll discuss, the differences between tape and disk, and talk more about software as well….