We've come across it more times than we care to mention. Companies that spend very little time on their backup needs. That is until a problem occurs and they really need that data they just lost, either simply losing man-hours or expensive data or having to pay for expensive data recovery services.
This is usually the point we are brought in by new customers!
So what happens if data is not backed up and there is no preparation for disaster?
The simplest scenario is a hard drive failure on one of the PCs (not so much of a problem with servers with RAID). As time goes on this gets more and more likely. Hard drives being mechanical devices are the most prone component to fail. Recovery of a single hard drive can cost upwards of £700 and may still not restore all the data. Other scenarios include accidental deletion over network shares, corruption of data to the worst case scenario of all you equipment and premises lost due to a larger disaster e.g. the building burning down, in which case any backups stored on-site will also be destroyed or simply the laptop with all the data on is lost or stolen.
Typically deployed to server enviroments.
These days we recommend online backup to everyone with less than 100Gb to backup. Online backup has less to go wrong, no set-up costs, needs very little attention compared to other solutions, and it is automatically off site every night and encrypted in a secure data warehouse without any user intervention. If there is an issue with the backup, an email is sent to the administrative contact for the backup.
We also like to have a USB drive onsite for a fast alternative backup system. Backup is important and doing it twice is not overkill, for several reasons - one is that Murphy's Law dictates that the day you need the backup it's failed the night before or you find some other problem, and secondly if you want a large (for instance 1Gb) file restored quickly then waiting for online backup can frustrate some people (even though it's there).
With a combination of USB and online backup you cover yourself and also allow for fast restoration on-site or slow and reliable restore from offsite.
Finally enabling Shadow Copy and imaging your drive using something like DriveImageXML or Acronis True Image can help save that last bit of sanity, when it comes to recovering previous versions easily or whole systems.
There are many online suppliers these days, from cheap providers aimed at the home market an onwards. We at runPCrun recommend two providers -
Other backup solutions we have used and look good (but haven't used enough to recommend thoroughly) are:-
If you're still not convinced, why not try a 15 day free trial at BackupDirect* and then relax knowing you've protected your business from disaster.Or you can ring runPCrun for some more advice for your business backup strategy.
* means there is some referal or partnership with these suppliers via the links given. Check out our stance on reviews and recommendations.
How-To Videos
Please note that these are external links to the original manufacturer of the software.
Online backup from Backup Direct gives you levels of protection normally only afforded to large enterprises.
Technology from one of the worlds leading providers -Connected Corporation- is deployed in two secure data centres in the UK to provide secure, simple, automated data backup to businesses - all for one low fixed monthly fee.
Each file backed up has a 10 version/90 day history. So you can go back further than just the last backup.
It's saved a huge amounts of our customers work, time and sanity, period.
This is a list of important practices that runPCrun recommend in order to keep your IT costs as low as possible.
