Best Practices For Data Back Up

Best practices for data back up

by

Terri Chu

No matter the size of your business, you have a lot to lose if your computer is to spontaneously combust. Unfortunately, this happens at a higher frequency than many people think. Anything from a virus to a hard drive failure to theft, or even fire can cause you to lose valuable information. Granted if you were to suffer a major fire on premise, securing your data might be the last of your worries, however, getting back to business might prove a challenge if you no longer had your client list to contact.

The value of each episode of corporate data loss is estimated at approximately $4,000 for small companies. It takes into account the value of the data, cost of technical services, as well as lost productivity. For larger corporations, the cost can escalate rapidly.

A better way to deal with data loss is to prevent the loss in the first place. Depending on the size of your business, solutions will vary based on the number of employees, and the amount of critical data related to each person. For example, if you are a florist, have 10 staff, with 3 computers to manage inventory, client lists, suppliers, and marketing, you have lower data management needs than say an architectural firm with only 5 employees, each with a computer and files upon files of drawings on each.

Good practice is to always have at least 2 copies of your essential data at any given time. Redundancy reduces the risks tremendously. Even if one computer goes down, we can get you back up on a brand new computer with all the old data copied over within hours. Better practice is to also keep at least one copy of the data “offsite”.

In general, best practice is to have nightly backups from each PC to the main server, and weekly backups from the main server to a different physical location. This can be done several ways.

1) Remote offsite back up where data is backed up remotely. Pros: convenience, automatic. Cons: potential security issues, takes a long time.

2) Physical backup and removal of data. Most often the office secretary is designated as the “back up person” who must pop in the media, push the “run” button, and often take the data home with him/her. Depending on security needs and cost restrictions, a closet is absolutely sufficient to satisfy most company requirements (provided you don’t work with sensitive materials).

Some industries have more stringent requirements than others. Some companies require the offsite data centre to be location so many miles away from the main building. Reasons for this include catastrophic power failures that take out entire city blocks or accidents that might render an entire area inaccessible. For most small business owners though, a 10 mile radius disaster zone would give us more than our data to worry about.

This all sounds too expensive!

There are lower cost solutions to data back up but it requires extreme diligence on your part. External hard drives are relatively inexpensive (around $150), and you can put your essentials onto the drive and take it home every night.

The only problem with this solution is the time. You back up your work every evening, and nothing happens, so you get less diligent. After a month, the frequency drops from daily to weekly, and then monthly or less. Then when a catastrophic failure does happen, you have data only as recent as half a year ago.

Depending on your needs, solutions will be different. It would be ludicrous to sell a financial service grade back up solution to a real estate office. However, thinking you’re immune from data loss is equally ludicrous.

Terri Chu is a technology consultant with

Revival Technologies

, a company which specializes in

Data Recovery

.

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Best practices for data back up