Stop Watch Web Director Mike Goodman addressed the Federation of Small Businesses on the matter of IT Disaster Prevention and Recovery. Here he addresses some of the main points raised both in the problems reported by the audience and the advice and facts given in the talk.
The Main Points
There were two points which were stressed over and over again:
- When a small or medium enterprise suffers seriuos data loss 80% of them never recover. They go out of business, mostly within a matter of a few weeks.
- Get a bckup copy off site.
Plan Carefully
The important thing is to have two strategies in place and to act upon them. The first is all about disaster prevention. Taking adequate security measures to prevent theft of data and careless loss of data is paramount. Most data loss, more than half, is engineered internally. That means disgruntled or careless staff or others with access to your premises and equipment. It is very easy to put a memory stick into a USB port and download a list of clients or other important data.
The second strategic factor is to plan for what happens when your prevention measures fail. How will you recover? How long will it take? How can you best phase your recovery plan so the mission critical data is operational first? The linchpin of such a strategy has to be yuor backup routine. You need a backup copy on site for quickest recovery, such as after a hardware or software failure. You also ned to know how you will replace hardware. Who sells hard disc drives in your close proximity? Where can yuo get a new computer if the one with the important data on is stolen? You also need an off site copy. If your uilding is sdestroyed by fire, flood, subsidence, you need a plan in place to set up in alternative accommodation. Your existing resources may not be available to you.
Test Your Plan
Will your strategy work in practice? Waiting until a disaster happens to find out is not a wise strategy to adopt. Test the plan thoroughly. Your Business survival may depend upon it.
Some Practical Tips
If you have several computers within your organisation it can be best practice to network them together using a server. The server can hold all the data and act as a file server and collaboration software repositary. This gives you one central point for backup operations and is the easiest and most efficient to organise. Linux is a very efficintt server platform and is also free. All you need is the hardware to install it on.
Add a tried and tested backup software application such as Amanda or Bacula and you cannot go far wrong. These applications help you set up an efficient routine for backing up. There is a fuller but not exhaustive list of Open Source and proprietary backup software at wikipedia. I strongly recommend you pay a visit and get your routine started. If you need help setting up and supporting a server to do the job please do get in touch. We charge for the service, but then that is how we earn our living.
For much smaller operations such as the single computer owning sole trader, it is often as easy as deciding what to back up, how often, and to use portable media such as memory sticks, writable CDs or DVDs or portable hard drives. Be consistent and back up to a proper, regimented routine. What is important is that the backups are made and one copy is taken off site.
Getting a copy off site can be done either by removable media or you can use an online backup service. If you have a lot of data do bear in mind that it can take an awfully long time to initialise an online service. Upload speeds on ADSL are far far slower than download speeds.
One final piece of advice: when changing the software you use for any purpose, ensure old data which needs to be kept can be moved onto an accessible platform before it becomes obsolete. Discovering a few years or even months down the line that your old data is no longer accessible can have very similar effects to losing it or having it stolen.