Have you actually done a back up recently?
Greetings All,
I was chatting to someone today about data security & backups. It reminded me of something that happened about 6 years ago.
I was consulting at the time & was at a clients site in London. We went through some recommendations I’d made & he mentioned that I’d need to do any work twice as they had a fairly thorough disaster recovery plan in place.
He went on to explain to me how it worked – they had created a duplicate of the entire office & data was automatically synched between the live site & the backup site every night. In the event of a ‘disaster’ they could simply relocate the entire team (about 40 people) the the backup site.
I asked him where the backup site was – wondering if I could have the work done in one day & how far I’d have to travel. “Oh it’s not a problem” he said – “it’s just through there”, & sure enough it was – they’d bought the ajoining office & installed a mirror image of the office we were standing in.
His face was a picture of confusion when I asked him what would happen if the entire block was blown up or burnt down……
Anyway – onto the point of this post.
- Have you done a backup?
- Have you done one recently?
- Where is the backup stored?
If you haven’t backed up your work/data (accounting, links, logins, passwords etc.) you will regret it – don’t think it won’t happen to you, because it will – & it will always happen at the most inconvenient time.
If you only backup once a month, then you need to ask yourself are you comfortable with losing a months worth of work/data – because you will do one day.
It’s pretty much pointless to religiously backup & keep the backups in the office – try to imagine worst case scenario – I normally recommend that people plan for their workplace & everything in it being destroyed completely.
Offsite backups are a must – I know a guy who does daily incremental backups & weekly complete backups – he takes these home from the office every day & once a week he transfers them to a rented storage facilty – he could theoretically take his systems back in time to exactly how they were 7 years ago. This is probably going a little far for most of us, but he’s content that he’s safe.
A more realistic solution might be to store your data on the web – Google GDrive is imminent if the rumours are to be believed. There are a whole host of other online backup/storage solutions though, I’ll review some of them in a future post but if you can’t wait, here’s a start.
So – the message you should take away is fairly obvious – be a little pessimistic for a change & plan for the worst – if it doesn’t happen it’s a bonus – if it does – you were at least prepared.
TTFN
BFG
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