Your Two Best Friends: Dogs and Backups

Hard drive failure. Computer virus. Loss of data. Cringe-inducing events that you either have experienced or inevitably will experience first-hand. And without a sufficient backup solution in place, it’s an event that can have serious consquences for your business. So just what constitutes a “sufficient backup solution?”

Why back up?

First let’s ask the question, “what is a backup?” In its simplest form, it’s just a copy of some or all of the data from a computer. It could be a complete image of the system, i.e. not just data and documents, but the programs and operating system as well. This leads us naturally to the “why” of backups: a backup is a copy of your data that you can use to recover from data loss or corruption.

Scheduling

When should backups be made? Do you have a lot of documents (data) that are changing on a daily basis? Then a daily backup is probably a good idea. Are your backups automated or manual? In event of disaster, the files you recover are only as recent as your last backup. So ask yourself, “how far back in time can I afford to lose my files or changes?”

Location

Where does the backup exist? It could be located on an external hard drive, a thumb drive, on tape, in the cloud (on-line) – any number of places, depending upon your IT environment and your specific needs. In a home computing environment, it might be sufficient to just copy your documents and photos to a flash drive, or to an external hard drive. Small and medium businesses typically will need a more robust, scalable, and regimented solution, encompassing multiple desktops, laptops (and remote users!) and servers, stored off-site for safety.

Recovery

Which brings us to what is perhaps the most overlooked part of any backup solution: the actual recovery and restoration of data. Any backup solution should not only include what to back up, when to do it, and where the backups are stored, but how the backups are to be accessed in case of disaster. When your office floods or your laptop takes a nose-dive onto the sidewalk, you will want to have a recovery plan in place ahead of time, which you can implement in a timely manner.

At Syncretic, our IT professionals are experienced at disaster recovery planning and implementation. Contact us for a consultation & let us help you secure your data before disaster strikes.

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