Backups
June 27, 2008
We’ve recently worked with a couple of clients who have both experienced similar problems, and these problems have threatened the entire business as a knock-on effect.
You see, neither client was making regular backups of their data. So when one client’s PC (As always, the one with the essential data on it) crashed, they suddenly discovered how much trouble they could be in. In the other case, the client had deleted the files, and then also emptied the recycle bin before realising they didn’t have the important data any more. Ooops.
In both cases, we’ve managed to get the data back intact. Taking the hard-drive into another PC saved the data in the first case (the crash wasn’t hard-disk related) and judicious use of an undelete program has been a god-send in the second case.
But in both cases, the problem wouldn’t have been there at all if backups had been being done.
A backup policy is essential to any company. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a small startup or a mutlinational organisation – data security and backups are simply something you can’t do without.
It doesn’t even take much time to set up. For a small to medium-sized company, a simple NAS (Network Attached Storage) box will sit in the computer network and be a storage area for your backups. A product like Buffalo’s Terastation is more than sufficient for basic requirements – currently they go up to a massive 4 Terabytes (That’s 4000Gb) which should backup everything in a business.
The backup software doesn’t need to be super-powerful or super-expensive either. We regularly recommend SyncBackSE by Two Bright Sparks – it currently costs £16, and makes taking backups to a NAS drive entirely automatic.
The Terastation might cost £600-£650. But for less than £1,000 all told, it means your data is all safe and backed up.
Surely peace of mind is worth that investment?