Warning: Why You Need a Backup Plan
Picture this: you have all the beloved pictures from your first child on your laptop. You took the time to organize them by month and importance. You renamed them from the archaic naming scheme that your camera uses to something like “babyname.FirstSteps.jpg”. The screensaver on your laptop cycles through the pictures for all to see. Then one day the laptop makes a dreaded noise and you see the lovely blue screen of death and POOF, your pictures and everything else on your laptop are gone or corrupted. Devastating! You need a backup plan.
Did you have anything backed up to another source other than your laptop? Did you put them on CD’s, DVD’s, an external hard drive, or the cloud? You need to think about these things in the modern age that we live in with digital media and our growing dependency on it. You can use cloud based backup services such as mozy.com or carbonite.com to back up your files. You can use external hard drives or DVD’s, but you need to keep them offsite at a trusted friend’s house or a bank deposit box. However, they need to be easily accessible so you can keep them updated. I bet you are thinking “Why do I need to keep them offsite – that seems pretty inconvenient?” A slight inconvenience will be worth it if your house burns down and your only backup goes with your laptop in poof of smoke and flames. Theft is another reason to backup your data and keep a copy in an offsite location.
Businesses also need to keep this in mind. You can backup data all you want within your data center but what if your data center disappears tomorrow? Where are your backups? Ask your IT staff if your data is backed up and can be retrievable in the event of disaster. Ask yourself how important your business data is and how devastating it would be if it was lost. An ounce of protection today can prevent a ton of pain tomorrow. I don’t care if your backup solution is a manual file copy from one office to another. The point is that you need to have a backup plan, so think ahead and prepare for potential disasters and how you would survive them.
There are numerous software packages and companies that specialized in enterprise disaster recovery tools. Commvault is one of the industry leaders that have a holistic backup solution. We, at W3i, utilize Commvault for our enterprise backups both in our data center and to copy data to an offsite location in the event of a disaster in our production data center. We test key systems on a quarterly schedule to ensure that we have full faith in our backups. Our confidence level of our backups is extremely high. How high is your confidence level?
How would it feel to lose the precious pictures of your first born? How devastating would it be if your company lost its essential production databases? Plan for the worst, and you will be prepared if it happens. If you have any other advice for backing up your data, feel free to leave it in the comments?
Matt Brauchler, System Administrator, W3i, LLC
Matt has over 7 years expirence working in Information Systems. He is a System Administrator for W3i with an emphasis on Enterprise Virtualization and Disaster Recovery Solutions. He is also a lawn perfectionist and enjoys learning new technology.
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