As I've started writing for this blog, I've been reminded one of a small business' biggest needs in a very close-to-my-heart kind of way...
Data Backups and Restore Solutions...
I created this blog a little over a week ago with great and grand intentions to help other small to medium business owners and managers from my person experiences. I selected and tweaked my personal design, setup a screen layout, put up my first post and invited several people to see my handiwork. Then went back a day later to check on things and found that my blog was gone - yes GONE - with a cute little error message that said my blog did not even exist! I did a little research and found out that Blogger had a catastrophic database failure and lost everyone's blogs. They began the 2 day restore process to bring every up and asked for everyone's patience. I waited my two days and found that this blog STILL didn't exist. A little more research brought to light that I wasn't going to get my blog back because they could only restore to the point in time of the day BEFORE I set mine up. I was out of luck and just had to start over. Of course, of which I did...
Important lesson and a personal mantra...
Backups are only as good as the point which they can be restored.
Backups should almost be renamed Restores. Because if you can't restore, your backups are virtually useless.
So, let's review a few typical backup solutions for small business:
- Tape Backups. This is where you have a tape drive on your server(s) and several tapes that you rotate and ensure all your data and system configurations are copied to tape on a regular basis. It is recommended that after tapes are copied, they are taken off-site in case of disasters such as building fire, theft or weather-related risks such as flood, hurricane or tornado. In today's world, tape drives are loosing popularity because they tend to be slow and our need for data often exceeds tape capacities.
- Hard Drive Backups. These are very similar to tape backups, but instead of using tapes, files and configurations are copied to an external hard drive. Hard drives are relatively inexpensive, are much faster than tape and come in various sizes into the terrabytes so they address our growing data needs. The same off-site recommendations apply.
- File Backups. Many people copy just their important data files to another source such as a server share or thumb drive. These may appear to be very effective, but won't bring back (restore) server configuration settings which may slow the ability to keep your business running during a catastrophe.
- Off-site or Cloud Backups. A great solution for servers and workstations (laptops included). Typically, every device is provided a unique encryption key and special software is installed. After an initial file "sync", this software just stays working in the background and synchronizes your changes to your service provider's network of secure, redundant servers. If you ever need to "go back" on a file, you just use their tools to get a past version of your file - sometimes as far back as several versions ago. This style of backup works very nicely for laptops that are not in the office regularly since it does not matter where you are as long as you connect to the internet. Backing up servers in this manner however does require some planning as well as a review of your internet bandwidth to ensure you can get a completed back up without affecting your office users.
It's also very important to ensure you are not only getting copies of your important data files, but also your network configuration like Active Directory and other server configurations. Your SQL databases and Exchange mail servers have some very special requirements for backups as well that need to be reviewed.
What ever your backup style, it's always a good recommended to perform a restore (at least partially) from your backups on a regular basis to prevent any belief that your backups are being made yet experience a failure in times of critical need.
In a future blog, I'll review a few of the name brands of products and services to further discuss these options.
Also, I would recommend to discuss your backup and restore solution with an I.T. professional (like CAP5) to ensure you are getting the most for your I.T. dollar. Schedule it today! Don't be caught in the unfortunate position of not being able to restore your business after a failure.
As always, you can visit our website for more information www.capfive.com.
Until the next post... What can the "Cloud" do for my business?
