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Frighteningly a very high percentage of business around the world are only a very short step away from total data loss even though they believe they are all ok. A principal culprit here is un-validated tape back ups. Simply put many companies go through a tape backup procedure but in the event of a problem it is only then that they realise the company back up has failed

Through some basic steps, businesses can better protect themselves against catastrophic data loss, these steps include:

• · Why do I need a Disaster Recovery Plan (DR) plan?
• · Defining and planning
• · Implementation
• · Testing

Fire, flood, human error, hardware failure and malicious acts can all cause a small business to at best suffer financial losses, at worst and is far too often the case, shut down for good, every business is susceptible to some king of outage, the need to plan for a disaster is real and needs to be carried out.

One of the most important aspects of a disaster recovery program is to ascertain what are the critical elements of your business. This will vary from business to business so for some it could be to ensure that data subject to long term availability due to legislation is always protected and for others it could be that the value of the business is held in the company CRM database. Whatever the case make sure your DR plan encompasses your most valuable assets at the very least.

Your plan should enable you to bring your business back online as rapidly as possible. Down time is very costly and without putting to fine a point on it the more employees you have the worse a few hours of loss production will be when you take into account the economies of scale.

Remote data backup is a useful tool to have in your disaster recovery portfolio. Many companies will have data and tape back up data stored on company premises. In the event of a major catastrophe such as a fire all company data could be lost. Utilising offsite remote data backup ensure that data is still safe and could even be accessed from another location if required.

Every company will have different requirements so it is always worthwhile to have internal discussions to ascertain each departments principal requirements. Once this is done requirements can be broken down into manageable portions and sections to ensure nothing critical is missed from the plan or overlooked during your internal assessments.

And last but not least test test test! Sadly numerous stories abound of companies that have set up a DR plan of sorts then simply assumed it would work. You need to ensure your plan is robust and tested on a regular basis to ensure key personnel are practiced in its implementation.

Disaster recovery planning, data recovery service and online data backup protocols should be in place for every business that has critical business data and systems. Don’t wait until it is to late and disaster has already struck.

New business owners have a lot of worries to keep them tossing and turning at night into the wee hours. One technology ‘what if’ is the loss of critical data to a server crash, virus, hard drive failure or a larger mishap such as a fire or flood.

For new business owners working hard to build and develop their business, the thought of backup are probably not high on the priority list but any backup solution is better than none. Something as simple as copying critical data to a external hard drive or memory stick once a day or even once a week.

Sure, even memory sticks fail but at least USB memory recovery is a viable option as a simple form of data backup

Even if you do not have the time or budget to put in place a decent data backup regime simply copying essential data to an external hard drive is surely better than a lack of any sort of policy, of course the crucial element in an back up procedure is just that , it is a procedure and should be adhered to……regulary!

One of the commonest mistakes in data backup is of course not to test your back up data to ensure that it is retrievable. This may sound strange but it is very necessary as many business have found out at huge cost that although a backup was being made it had not been successful.

As well as the potential cost of attempted data recovery when a backup has been found to fail , there is also the intangible (until it happens) cost of lost business due to system down time, and in extreme cases total business failure if legislation required business records to be kept for any length of time, which can be years.

Sadly for many businesses back up protocols will be left as a low priority until an actual data loss occurs and backup, just like an insurance policy is there for when you need it even though most of the time you do not.

As well as back up to external media offsite storage is also an option, however this methodology can be quite time consuming as data needs to be uploaded or downloaded en-masse which is very time consuming and consumes a lot of bandwidth.

Another option which is relatively new is an automatic real time backup using the internet. This consists of a program running in the background backing up data as you are working. This means you do not have to remember to backup up at regular intervals as it does it all for you once it is set up.

Online data backup is becoming a very favourable option for savvy IT professionals.

Of course a huge benefit is that if you need to access your data when you are away from your office, even if your laptop has been stolen or you simply didn’t bring it with you, you could access your data anywhere else in the world depending on your configuration.

The most important take away from all this is of course if you don’t have a data backup solution in your business get one before it is too late, and once you have one test it to ensure it functions correctly.

And of course an effective backup policy is far less costly than the costs of disaster recovery and data recovery .