Top 3 Mistakes Small Businesses Make With

For most organizations data is one of their most valuable assets. Unfortunately, data backup is something that is easily overlooked or gets pushed to the back when more important issues like servicing clients and paying bills come first. Oftentimes someone has heard enough foresight to put some initial backup in place, but over time things change and what they thought was a good backup was no longer the case.

There are two primary ways we see this happening. The first scenario we see are failed backups and the second is a backup schedule that no longer protects data.

In the first scenario a backup is created and someone is given the task of pulling a tape and taking it home with them. However, this person rarely looks at any logs to see if the backup is actually successful and even fewer times do they actually try to perform a restore of the data. There have been several instances where everything looked fine in the logs, but when a restore needed to be performed the data could not be restored and the data was lost.

To prevent this scenario it is good for small businesses to regularly test their backups by restoring data on a regular schedule. It's also good to setup e-mail alerts or use an automated offsite backup service.

In the 2^nd scenario we see is that something in the environment changes and data is no longer being backed up. Typically this happens when a new server or new user is added to an organization. That user may not know where to store their data or it may be an oversight on someone's part to make sure that data is located in a consistent place to get data backed up.