What $ value is your data (intellectual Property)

The answer: PRICELESS! I recently asked a Data Engineer, Tom Earle, what his thoughts were about the Top 3 mistakes we (users) make in regards to our back up systems and here is his response:

"Whether your business is a large corporation, a small business or a home office, the information stored in your computer is usually essential to your business.  That is why most everyone has some type of backup plan.  If you don't have a backup plan, you have to ask yourself, "If my computer crashes and can't be fixed, how will the loss of all of my data affect my business?"  That is a scary proposition and should be on the top of your things to do list.  In addition, are you knowledgeable enough to do it yourself or should you get a professional to do it?

For those who do have a backup plan, is it good enough to prevent data loss?  What happened if your backup device fails?  What will happen if your office suffers a disaster? How do you know that it will work in case of a problem?   These are a couple of things to think about when evaluating this most important aspect of your business.

The first thing to evaluate is where your backups are going, are they going to tapes, to external disk drives, to online backup services or to CD/DVDs.  Are they going to only one place or to multiple places?   The biggest mistake some people make when setting up a backup plan is in putting all of their eggs into one basket.  If you only use tapes what happens if the tape or tape drive itself fails?  If you only use external hard drives, do you have more than one in case one fails when you need it most?  How old is the data on the second or third hard drive?  The best answers to these questions are to implement redundancy, have more than one backup type, used everyday.  If you use tapes and hard drives and an online service, your chances of getting your data back quickly and confidently are greatly increased.

The second area of concern that has recently affected many businesses across the country is the possibility of a disaster.  Where would you be if you had a disaster like a fire, a flood or even a theft, in which your entire office is lost?  Except in the case of online backup services, the only way to avert this type of problem is to ensure that you have offsite storage in place.  This means that everyday, a copy of your entire systems data is physically taken offsite.  This can be as simple as taking your backup tape or drive and storing them in your car, taking them home or to a safety deposit box.  This will ensure that you will at least have something, even if it is a couple of days old, should a disaster occur.  Lastly, you have to test your backup system.  Once you go thru the time and expense of setting up a proper backup system, most people don't test their backup systems until they need it and then find out that it is not as good as they thought it was.  You have to prove to yourself that it works by restoring files that are accidentally deleted, having a mock drill if the server crashes or reloading data from a backup source to another computer or server.  The only way to gain confidence in your backup system is to test it and test it again.  Other considerations when testing your backup system is who will perform this task, how long will it take to restore your data if it is lost and how long will it take to get replacement equipment in place before you can get back online."

Losing critical data happens everyday and the time & cost to retrieve it is unbelievable if even possible.

Steven J. Krisfalusy