If you own a business and your data is important to you, you will have some sort of system in place for backing it up. Whether it’s via tape drives, a NAS device, a back-up Server, a portable storage device, Online or Offline (or several other options) you know that your business data is safe because you have a perfect copy.
However, back-up devices (like all technology) can fail. This can be due to many reasons, some of them being hardware failure, a service failure on the Server, the back-up device reaching capacity (…or because someone forgot to change the tape, doh)
This means that when disaster strikes or you simply want to recover an old copy of a file you are unable to do so because the back-up simply isn’t there.
As an IT company it is our responsibility to ensure our managed services clients’ data is protected. First of all we insist that a robust back-up device is in place and then we take certain steps to ensure that the back-up device is actually working.
And how do we do this?
Well, firstly we set up alerts to notify us every time a back-up takes place letting us know if the back-up was successful – but even this cannot be 100% accurate. To be extra safe we run what are known as ‘test restores’ every few months. A test restore involves an engineer creating a file, backing it up and then destroying the file. The engineer then attempts to restore that file from the back-up device and confirm that the back-up device is doing what it is supposed to do!
This gives our clients complete peace of mind when it comes to the protection of their business data.
If you are concerned about the reliability of your back-up device or you would like more information about stabilising your IT environment please contact me on 0121 3090060 or send me an email suzie@supremesystems.co.uk
