Business Article - Disaster Recovery and Backing Up Data
Regardless of whether you are running a small business, or a giant corporation, one of the most valuable of all assets that your business has is the electronic data that keeps it running from day to day. The electronic data that belongs to your business is going to include financial information, documentation for sales and clients, and any other digital data and information that is stored either on your file servers, or on your computers.
Is online data backup part of your business disaster recovery plan? If your business is not prepared for this type of disaster, what will you do to protect yourself and prevent this happening? Have you ever thought about what could actually happen to all of that important information belonging to your company if you were ever to become to victim of a natural, or even a man-made disaster? The recovery effort for a disaster like this could be quite expensive, and your business may never be able to recover from such a drastic loss. Where would you even begin when it came to recovering this kind of data? All of these questions and many others are vital when it comes to preparing a disaster recovery plan.
Each and every single business plan today, regardless of whether it is a small business or a large corporation, should have some semblance of a disaster recovery plan put into place to protect electronic data from being lost. Your company absolutely must be able to recover electronic data if anything should happen to your buildings or your servers that may jeopardize it. The best place to begin when it comes to building a disaster recovery plan is making some seriously tough choices regarding how data should be archived, and where this archived data should be stored once backups have been created.
One option that is definitely worth considering when it comes to backing your data up is to make data backups on tapes every single day. If you are only working with a small amount of data, then daily backups can be performed completely every single evening by using your file server when no one is in the building or using any technology. If you choose to back your data up every single night, it will take multiple tapes so that you can build an archive from which to restore your data should the need ever arise. This is also helpful in case one of your tapes has issues, as you will have other archive tapes to work with instead.
If you decide to perform backups on site, then it is important for you take archival media offsite at least once every week to create an archive that is protected from physical threats. You can ensure that a disaster in your building will not wipe all of your data by storing a copy of said data offsite at all times. This is especially useful in the event that you have to rebuild your computer and file servers completely from scratch after disaster strikes.
Keep in mind the fact that there is a downside to backing up your data onsite. This is because you are required to have an IT or Information Technology technician physically change the tapes out. This Information Technology technician must be able to remember to move your media tapes offsite every single week. Localizing the task has another downside as well, which is the fact that the media tapes tend to be relatively expensive to buy, and many of them are needed if you are replicating your data on a nightly or weekly basis.
Luckily there is a much more attractive option which is preferable to using onsite data backup. This more attractive option is simply to perform all of your replication directly to an offsite back up location. This can be done simply by utilizing a backup service, which is a professionally run and legitimate service which will make the process a whole lot easier. Utilizing a professional online data backup service is actually easy, requiring only that you schedule a specific time for your server and backup service to connect so that your data may be duplicated directly onto the other server. The data will be sent over the Internet through a channel that is encrypted and secure.
There are a large number of advantages to using this type of online data backup service. You will never have any need to purchase tapes or tape drives, which will save you more money than you could ever know in the long run. You will also never have to have someone who can remember to physically change out your data tapes every single day, let alone to remember to bring them to a different offsite location every few weeks or days.
It is also much, much more safe for you to store your important data in a location that is far from your business, especially when it comes to building a safe and secure computing environment. If something should ever happen that would negatively affect your data or your data servers, you could rest assured that your backup data was safe in a computing environment across town or just down the street.
It is absolutely vital to the existence of your business that you address this issue as quickly as you can. The issue of storing and backing up all of your electronic data to protect it from potential threats and disasters is absolutely necessary to address if you want to keep all of that vital information safe from day one. By creating a disaster prevention and recovery plan, a part of the business plan that is all to commonly overlooked, you can rest assured that your data is safe and secure at all times. This truly could be the difference between having your company remain in the black, and finding yourself closing your doors all too early. Businesses in the United States are losing more than $12 billion dollars a year because they have lost data that easily could have been prevented by preparing an adequate plan for backing up data and preventing data loss. Critical files should always be backed up if you want to prevent such a costly loss from occurring.
Developing a data protection plan or strategy should involve several elements, each which is more vital than he last when it comes to data protection. There are many different types of data protection solutions, as well as a wide range of different costs associated with these options. All of these options come down to three main functions however, and these should be the deciding factors for which service to choose rather than going with the price to make a determination. All data protection options boil down to capacity, data restoration and data transfer.
Magnetic Tapes – These are still the main and most popular storage medium for many businesses, because magnetic tapes have a much longer shelf life than hard drives, making the data archival process a lot more reliable. Data transfer rates were formerly extremely slow, running between eleven and thirty megabytes per second. Now, however, modern magnetic tape drives have doubled the speed and more, and can store information in terabytes thanks to a vast improvement made in the technology involved.
Hard Drives – These are an extremely cost-effective alternative to the traditional magnetic tape. Hard drives are also a popular option as RAID can be used to protect them by ensuring a tolerance to hardware faults, which is a feature that you will not find on the traditional magnetic tape data backup.
The key to using both forms of media is offsite storage, because onsite storage is not going to protect you from natural disasters like fires and floods, both that are more than capable of wrecking havoc on all of your equipment. Having access to most of your data at an offsite location is what will make your data protection strategy so successful. If your data is stored in the same place as your server, data recovery is still going to be required if a natural disaster ever hit. This is why storing your data offsite is more important, because then you always have two sturdy copies of your data, and a very, very rare chance that both will ever be hit together.
By implementing a data recovery and disaster protection plan, you can add a great deal of peace of mind to your business operations by eliminating the fear that data will ever be lost in large amounts. Losing important business data can truly break a business, so avoiding this possibility is one of the greatest things that you can do.