With the weather changing and the Gulf Coast preparing for another hurricane season, now is the time to take a look at where your data is and whether your business is prepared to recover quickly after a disaster. So what constitutes a good backup, and how do you know if you are truly protected?


What is a backup?
Although it seems like a simple question, far too many people are confused by the term and what it entails. A common misconception is that data stored external to your computer is a backup, but this is not necessarily true. To even start saying your data is "backed up", it must exist in two separate physical locations. Moving your pictures to an external drive and accessing them directly is not a backup, because you still only have one copy of the data. Likewise, making a copy of your Quick Books database and putting it into a different folder on the same hard drive is not a true backup, because the hard drive is still one physical location.

What do I backup?
This depends entirely on your organizational needs, available space on your chosen medium, and your business requirements. Some organizations may need to backup every piece of data, others may only require certain files be available. If you are unsure, the best option is to contact your IT provider.

Selecting a target
Once you've decided what needs to be backed up, you can look at which backup medium works best for your organization. Storing backups on flash drives and writable CD/DVDs is cheap, but they are limited on space and not designed for long-term storage. Tape drives are the most popular with businesses and provide large storage capacity and fast speeds. More recently, offsite storage has become a popular option, allowing businesses to store backups in secure data centers for a low monthly cost. Hundreds of options exist and it is not uncommon for a business to utilize more than one.

Distance equals security
Generally speaking, the further away your backups are from their source data, the more protected you will be from the forces of nature and theft. Too many businesses keep their backup tapes sitting on top of their server, which provides zero protection from flood or fire that may consume both. Our minimum recommendation is to keep the backup in a secure safe onsite, but the best option is to utilize an offsite service to keep your data far away from whatever natural disaster may befall your business.

Monitoring and testing the backup
These are the most often overlooked components. There is no such thing as a "set it and forget it" backup solution; backups need to be monitored (either by you or a third party provider) and tested regularly to verify that you are able to restore files. Remember, a backup is no good if you can't restore it!

This is just a brief overview of a very critical part of business continuity during a disaster. Dedicating some of your budget to ensuring your backups are complete, accessible, and easy to recover will help protect your business during the 2010 hurricane season and beyond.