Disasters Happen
By David Schulz, Operations Manager
I'd like to remind everyone to spend a minute reviewing their backup policy. Here are a few helpful hints:
- If you don't know that it's being backed up – it isn't
- A backup is not complete until you have successfully restored data from your backup tape
- If you haven't already done so, please initiate a program where a trusted individual takes a full backup tape offsite on a regular basis (usually once per week)
- Explore other means of off-site data storage (such as an automated backup conducted over the Internet to a secure backup location). There are backup services for servers and individual PCs as well.
- Institute a backup policy and promulgate it to all employees. In it you should describe which areas of the network get backed up (eg. User shares on a server) and which don't. Typically, IT Departments take responsibility to back up everything on the servers. That means that data on PCs (typically the C: drive) is not backed up so users should not keep important data there.
- Remember, things change. New databases and file areas get created, but your backup system may not automatically begin backing up those items.
- The time to find out something is not being backed up is not after it's been lost.
Backups are the most crucial element to successful a disaster recovery plan. Please think about what would happen to you and your company if all of your data was irretrievably lost. I've heard statistics that claim that only 30% of businesses who experience a total data loss are in business a year later.