Make regular backups routine

September 10, 2008

By Rick Edvalson

Tornados, floods, fires and lightning – summer’s annual challenges to business continuity. But I can tell you from personal experience that it doesn’t take a natural disaster to cause a devastating business loss.

A few years ago our own company experienced a potentially catastrophic disaster. We had been in a new facility for a little more than a week when an arson-caused fire destroyed all of it. Our computers were charred, and the monitors were melted. Nothing was recoverable from any of them.

Thank goodness we had made a practice of keeping all data on the network server, performing a full tape backup every night, and taking the previous night’s tape offsite each day. The day after the fire, we set up a new server in a temporary office. We restored our data and network settings from the tape, and we were functioning again.

In contrast, consider a company acquired by a friend of mine some years ago. It was a nice little business that employed about 100 people at its peak. One morning, everyone came to work to find the computers down. The server’s hard drives had failed overnight. They tried to restore from tape, but to management’s dismay, they discovered that the last good backup was months old.

A secretary had been dutifully changing the tape in the backup drive each day, but she didn’t know how to tell whether the backup had been successful or not – and it had not been. All the company’s data was lost, including the records of its inventory and accounts receivable – the primary collateral for a large bank line of credit. In a few weeks, the bank had foreclosed and the owners had lost the company to my friend, who purchased it for a song.

Regardless of the cause, the loss of key computers at many small businesses could be disastrous because the backups at these organizations are either inadequate or non-existent. There are three guiding principles that should be implemented by all businesses that are dependent on their computers:

First, make full backups every day. A relatively common practice in some organizations is to back up only the “data.” The managers of these organizations are probably not aware that quickly recovering from a disaster will require more than just “data.” Many network settings and configurations can take substantial effort to recreate if they cannot be restored from a backup.

Second, verify that the backup is successful. A wise manager will make sure that someone knows how to confirm that the daily backups are effective, and that they do so.

Third, take a copy of the backup offsite. Some organizations back up to another computer on the network, or to an external hard drive that is attached to the server. In many cases, if the server is destroyed, this type of backup will likely be lost as well.

We encounter business managers from time to time who have signed up with an online backup service. While online backups do enable offsite storage of a company’s data, there are significant potential problems with online backups due to limitations in bandwidth to the Internet. Not only do most online backup schemes take a long time to establish a full backup, retrieving the information to restore to a server can also take days.

We once got a company as a new client that had been using an online backup service. When it became necessary to restore some data, the backup service could not identify which data was needed. After some delay, the service company delivered to our client a CD with various files and folders on it. It was left to the client to make any sense out of what was on the CD. If our client had been trying to recover from a catastrophe, it is doubtful that they would have been able to do so.

When communities are destroyed by natural causes, there is often a discussion about the puzzling lack of political will that prevents folks from preparing adequately for potential disasters. Managers should be sure that they do not succumb to a similar lack of will. It could cost them their business.

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