Preventing Disaster with Layered Backups
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- The Document That Could Save Your Business
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- Preventing Disaster with Layered Backups
- Fire the Post Office
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The first time your computer crashed you learned your lesson. You lost all of your data including your Quickbooks files and you almost lost your business. One year later you spent countless hours of overtime this week preparing for the biggest sales pitch of your career Monday afternoon. This time you were careful you saved your files to the server and the server has a backup tape so you must be protected. A phone call wakes you at 4 AM Monday morning."Mr Smith" the officer says, "are you the owner of the business located at 1337 Front Street?." Your stomach hits the floor. Your server and backups tapes have been stolen. Can your business survive this again?
The Problem
Information technology is full of eye popping software and fascinating gadgets. Our attention is drawn to the latest and greatest like moths to the flame. Just like the moth this behavior can be our demise in the business world. Backup solutions are far from glamorous. Eventually the inevitable happens and your computer or server goes down taking your essential files with it. That dull technology we know as data backup could be the only thing that can save your business.
Facts & Figures
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Although hard drive vendors suggest the annual hard drive failure rate is less than 1%, a recent study has shown the real world rate is closer to 13%. This means statistically that businesses with 10 computers will experience hard drive failure in one of them a year.
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Data recovery costs for a failed hard drive range from $500 to more than $10,000.
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Enterprise backup software can be purchased for $600 or less.
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According to a Pepperdine Study, the annual cost of data loss to US businesses is $18 Billion.
The Solution
Although the situation sounds daunting there are solutions. The secret to an effective data backup solution is layers. You should have at least three copies of your crucial data at all times. One of these copies should be stored off-site ideally 300 miles or more from your place of business. This distance is crucial as natural disasters such as Katrina can destroy all of you data if it is stored in one geographical area. Off-Site storage also protects you from theft as a thief may get your server but he is unlikely to get the backup stored in the bank vault. Each of these copies of your data provides you with an additional layer of protection. The more layers the better.
As an example of how this layered system can work take our business. The Binary Business data backup system consists of the following layers. Starting with my desktop as the center, all data on the desktop is mirrored to my laptop daily. This same data is continuously copied to a disk drive on the server. The server is also continuously backed up to a two disk mirrored drive array. Once a week one copy of the data from my mirrored drive array is taken to the bank and stored in a safety deposit box. Once a month another copy is taken to our Dallas office which is 350 miles from our main office in Lubbock. All told we utilize 6 layers of protection. In five years of operation we have never lost any data. The cost of all of these layers is less than $2000.
For information on how to implement your own layered protection system, please contact Binary Business.
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