Why onsite data backup is the right way to protect your business
Data backup is important. As computers get increasingly powerful, they can store a concomitant quantity of data (i.e., loads) – but they’re also more prone to falling over, and if they fall over before you’ve managed to do any data backup then you, and your business, are in serious trouble.
What happens is this. You store tons of data on your super-fast, memory rich machine. Its complexity reveals itself to be frailty when it experiences an irrecoverable system crash and six months’ worth of accounts, business files and data bite the dust. That kind of thing can sink a company forever – not to mention play merry hell with the taxman. The temptation not to do regular data backup – I’ve got a brand new, super duper machine, I’ll do my data backup next week – gets more and more overwhelming, the better one’s machine. And the potential for disaster grows ever greater.
Really, all businesses should be running data backup on a daily basis. In today’s time- and resource-pressured world, who has time to recover even one day’s worth of lost work? The last thing a company should do before it closes down for the night is make sure its data backup routine has started, dumping copies of all business servers and hard drives into discrete, protected and difficult-to-destroy media.
This kind of data backup is called onsite data backup – it encompass any kind of safety routine that transfers data onto physical media other than that in which it was created. So an onsite data backup routine might involve copying hard drives onto CD-ROM, DVD, or tape, and storing those items in a place separate from the location in which the original data exists. That way, a company has instant, daily access to its most recently backed up data. Onsite data backup is generally preferable to offsite data backup (where company data is backed up and stored in locations other than the site where that company runs its business) because of the time delay involved in retrieving data that has been backed up off site.
One of the most effective methods of onsite data backup is email backup. Email backup simply involves emailing oneself (preferably to an external email account) copies of important files. That way, if the server on which that information is stored in-house goes down, a user can retrieve the latest versions of the info from the email servers of (say) Yahoo! or Google. That said, of course, there are security concerns raised by performing data backup through use of email accounts that fall outside a company’s purview – which is where the employment of outside agencies, who can best advise on good practice for data backup, comes in.
Employing an external agency to advise on data backup is almost always the best way to generate ironclad data safety measures. External agencies can see the whole of your company’s data processes in an impartial light, which fits them well to offer solid tactical advice on how to perform workable data backup without interrupting your vital systems or the daily running of your business: or compromising security by making information potentially available to outside sources. An external agency like Computer Repair Ltd will come in, make a balanced assessment of your data backup needs, and offer practical advice on how to achieve the best data backup practices without disrupting normal operations.
