I have heard comments ranging from "I don't have that much data to worry about" to "hardware is so good these days that I do not have anything to worry about".
Well let me tell you if you are in business you do have data to worry about regardless of the amount. I have seen one person shops that do a very small amount of weekly transactions who have lost all data due to a hard drive failure and it took them a week of working nights to recover their accounting data just so they knew who owed them money!
Hardware is very good these days but the adage of 'when' not 'if' when discussing drive failure is still number one. Hard drives in particular probably fail more than they did in the early years. Drives are built with closer tolerances, they spin faster, generate more heat and cram more data in their platters than ever before. In my experience drive failure is the number one cause of data loss.
Failure from single laptop drives to 5 disk server drive arrays have all failed with the same results...no access to data!
Nothing ruins a business owners day more than when they can not access their accounting data.
So what should you do to protect that data. Well below are a few recommendations that will suit all budgets and levels of required redundancy.
Since backing up your data for a small business can range from relatively inexpensive ($50.00 per year) to expensive ($50,000.00 plus) it is important to know how much data loss you could suffer before you would begin to experience serious business interruptions. Now the obvious answer may be none but that is not always the case. For example a business that has a small number of daily transactions that have a paper trail for every transaction may be able to lose a weeks worth of data before it would have serious implication. The reason is that they could recreate the electronic transactions manually from their paper files. Now switch to a business that has many daily transactions and one weeks worth of data could be very difficult to recreate manually while still trying to run your business. Remember that all those invoices to customers who owe you money reside in that data.
It's not very nice to have to call your customers and ask them how much they owe you!
1. You should have at least one copy of all electronic data that resides on all computers in your office (servers and desktops). Preferably each office should have a central data repository where each workstation stores all critical data. One of the biggest mistakes that I see is an office that has a server running configured with an automated backup system but much of their the critical data is sitting out on individual desktop or laptop computers that do not have a backup system. Data should be backed up daily - some argue that you could get by with an less fequent back up such as weekly, or every second day, etc. but given the low cost of storage these days as compared to several years ago I recommend daily backups.
2. This backup should be readily accessible on a daily basis so that data can be accessed quickly to recover single files if necessary. Most daily recovery requirements result from single files that have been lost or overwritten and not from complete data failure.
3. A second copy of this data should be kept off site. Why you may ask. Well what happens if your building burns to the ground...ya your data burns as well. Now many business owners scoff at this and figure they will play the odds that this won't happen and no doubt that it is not a daily occurrence but I have seen it happen. I always use the analogy that your vehicle could stop with only one brake on one wheel but it that one brake fails then the results could be catastrophic. With regards to data loss regardless of how it happens if you are not able to recover it the results could be catastrophic. Keeping a copy of your data off site does not cost much but does require some diligence. I have also known of one company that had a break-in and their server with the backup system was stolen...bye bye data!
4. Back up system testing should be performed on a regular basis. 60% of backup systems fail. Tape drives don't run, software becomes corrupt, and other failures can occur that do not get reported by the system. The worst example I have withnessed was a company that experienced a hard drive failure on a server that was backed up by a tape system but the tape system never ran each night and the software was indicating that the backup was performed correctly each night. That company had to go back six months before they found a tape that had any data...Ouch!!So periodically you should test your system to ensure that it is backing up properly and can recover data. A simple test is to delete a test file that has been backed up and then attempt to recover that file.
There are many backup systems available but that topic isn't going to be covered here today. My intention was to stress the importance of placing a data backup/recovery system in your business.
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