What process does your company go through to check that your backup system is actually working correctly? Would you be comfortable erasing everything on your hard drive right now, and restoring it from backups?
No matter what type of backup solution you use in your company it was probably a somewhat significant investment. If your company is using a solution that requires manual intervention, such as popping a tape in and out of a drive each day or changing a backup hard drive, how certain are you that your backup media actually contains a complete redundancy of all of your company’s data?
Obviously this is the reason what you bought your backup solution for in the first place, and in a perfect world, that is what it is doing, but sometimes there are cases where data can get corrupt or tapes can lose their integrity and once a portion of your data goes missing, it could be very difficult, time-consuming and costly to restore.
Depending on your backup solution, it may be a simple process to evaluate the data or it may require some time to assess the integrity of your archived data. Tape backups have a particularly slow restore time, and for businesses that have fairly large amounts of data the process can be even longer.
Disk-to-disk-based backup solutions are much faster, and some solutions even have a very appealing failsafe for small businesses that let them run the servers backup image within a virtual environment or restore directly to temporary hardware, giving you a very responsive and accurate way to see if your business could survive based on the data that has been backed up.
It’s always work asking yourself, did you test your backup solution this month? Could you imagine losing all of the data you created this month simply because your backup solution wasn’t doing its job?
If you need assistance with your small business backup solution, want to know more about the best practices or need consultancy advice on the best solution for your business, call Innovation IT Support today on 01793 541320.