How to stop worrying and to start loving your backups

The weather forecasters have called for severe weather tonight. It has been a long day and you leave your office, anxious to beat the traffic that is sure to be bad due to the weather. As you leave, you don't even think of all of the new documents that were created on your file server. Let's face it, that is not something that most of us worry about in day to day life.

That night, the power goes out to your office building and the battery backup to the server did not work as expected. The disks running inside your office server that were spinning at 10,000 rotations per minute come to a screetching halt, helping to scramble all of the microscopic "1"s and "0"s that represent all of your hard work, your client's data and your employee's sales projects. The power comes back on and the server turns back on. Only this time, instead of booting, only a blinking cursor appears on the server's monitor.

It is 5AM on Tuesday morning. Do you know where your data is?

My power outage example is one of the most extreme examples of how you can lose critical business data on your server. More likely, you will have mistakenly overwritten the big Excel document you have been working on for a few days with nothing but blank rows. Or someone might have mistakenly delete a whole folder of last year's sales figures.

The reality of today's business is that you need a solid backup plan. You cannot afford to not have a backup of your data. Running a live computer network without backups is like running your business without insurance. Sure, you can do it, but what will it cost you when something bad happens? What legal ramifications do you face if you lose data that you are required to keep by law? How are you going to get your business running again?

According to an article from last year in USA Today, data loss costs U.S. businesses more than $18 billion a year!

I have been in this business long enough to see all kinds of systems failures, human errors, and just plain old bad luck with everything IT. All of these problems can be mitigated with backups.

I prefer to keep my clients on a multi leveled backup plan. It consists of taking snapshots of documents locally (for easy retrieval by your employees), complete OS backups at least weekly, and offsite backups of changed files daily.

How often and how much you back up is a question of your tolerance for loss versus what your budget will allow. Backup solutions can range from simple tape backups that cost a few hundred dollars to complete off site system redudancy (where a server that constantly mirrors your own sits in a controlled data center).

A good IT Consultant should be able to work with you to determine what your backup needs are and to work within your budget to help you achieve peace of mind.

Mark Barhorst, MCP
ThrottleNet, Inc.
mark@throttlenet.com

Mark Barhorst is a Microsoft Certified Professional. He has been working on complex business IT needs since 2001.