When most people think about data recovery, they don’t usually consider the effects of natural disasters. Their data recovery plans may take into account a lost file, a crashed hard drive or the occasional oops that happens when you push the wrong button in your database program. The fact is, though, that lost data makes up a large part of the economic damage suffered by businesses when a natural disaster strikes, especially if they haven’t thought ahead to ensure that their data is backed up and safe.
This year has been an especially terrible one for natural disasters – floods, earthquakes, fires, tornadoes and even volcanoes have shut down businesses, destroyed physical property and affected the data storage that most companies today rely on to run their businesses. If you’ve never considered how safe your data is before, the fact that a violent storm lasting less than 10 minutes can destroy your entire office, all of your computer equipment and, if you haven’t taken the step of backing up your data in a secure place, year’s worth of records that are vital to your business. If you haven’t already done so, you should make sure that you have a data recovery plan for floods and other natural disasters so that you can get back up and running as quickly as possible after a disaster strikes.
The most important aspect of an effective data recovery plan is backup planning. There are three types of backup plans, and your company may use one, two or parts of all three. Each has advantages and disadvantages you should consider with your information technology team.
Incremental backups save the most current and important data, or may back up one computer or hard drive at a time. It’s the least secure type of backup, but it’s also the quickest.
Differential backups go through your computer files and only save anything that’s changed since the last time you performed a full backup. Differential backups are a good idea if you have access to your current files or to all of the backups, but they can take a long time to restore in full because you need to apply all of the backups when you attempt to do a complete data recovery routine.
A full backup saves all of the data from all of your computers and databases so that you can restore the data completely if you suffer a major data loss. Full backups can take hours – even days – if your company has lots of data and computers. They’re the most reliable, but it’s seldom efficient to do full backups on a regular, frequent basis.
The best data recovery plans start with a reasonable mix of the three types of backup to ensure that you’ll always be able to restore your computer files and systems as close to their current state as possible. Your IT department should assess the risks to your computers and devise a backup plan that makes the most sense.
The second important leg of a data recovery plan for your company is offsite data storage. The best backup plan in the world is useless if the backups are destroyed in the same disaster that destroys your current data. There are many options available for storing your data out of harm’s way, including online data storage options that will store your data anywhere in the world.
The final leg of a data recovery plan is a plan for restoring the data if necessary.
If, despite your best efforts – or in the absence of them – you find yourself with lost data and no backup for restoration, identify a competent and reliable data recovery service, such as Fields Data Recovery, that can recover the data from your damaged disks, tapes or drives.
No comments:
Post a Comment