The exciting world of backups
Around sixty percent of companies that lose their data will shut down within six months of the disaster, despite that, more than thirty percent of companies don’t routinely back up their data.
Let’s be honest, almost nothing is as dull as having good data security, but as we see a reliable data backup ensures business existence, so there is no alternative.
Hardware defects, Software defects, theft, virus attacks, natural disasters (e.g. fire, flood) and even human error can cause data loss.
The results of a global survey, which compiled the responses of 3,200 IT and decision makers, suggests that data loss and downtime cost businesses a total of $1.7 trillion annually.
Backups should be run daily and in the night hours to not interfere with the business. For global companies it makes sense to analyze traffic to find the best time window to run backups.
Strategically it should be your plan to have at least three copies of your data, keep two copies stored at different locations and store at least one copy at an off-site location.
Magnetic tape is one of the best storage media to store data securely over a long period of time, due to recent improvements in the technology.
Tape libraries got much faster, cheaper and smaller than this IBM 726 from 1952:
To create the backup, it will be mostly enough to have volume shadow copies (VSS). However you always need to make sure that all of your applications support these backups, or if it is necessary to manually create scripts for your backups — invest the time to create proper log-files.
Regularly monitor your backups and make sure you are not part of the sorry sixty percent.
