Many small businesses have invested in a backup solution to protect their critical business data in the event of accidental deletion or system failure. There will come a day in your business when such an event happens.
At my work we lost our system administrator about a year ago and hired a local computer service company to ensure that the transition went well and that our company interested where taken care of. As part of their evaluation we where sold a backup server because our existing one couldn't manage the size of backup required to get a full backup daily. They organized people inside our business to switch out the tapes daily and take them home on alternating days of the week. Neither of these people have any IT experience. They where told eject the tape and put the tape in for that day. Late one Thursday afternoon one of these two people came to me and said, "I guess out backups have been failing for about a week. The IT service company has isolated our issue to the fact that we have outgrown the capacity of our current tapes." Immediately we began planning to purchase more tapes to fill the void. They arrived on Monday and I thought they where placed into the rotation to fill the gap so we could get a full backup. We got a partial backup on Monday night the part that would fit on one tape. The second half was scheduled to backup on Tuesday night.
At my work we lost our system administrator about a year ago and hired a local computer service company to ensure that the transition went well and that our company interested where taken care of. As part of their evaluation we where sold a backup server because our existing one couldn't manage the size of backup required to get a full backup daily. They organized people inside our business to switch out the tapes daily and take them home on alternating days of the week. Neither of these people have any IT experience. They where told eject the tape and put the tape in for that day. Late one Thursday afternoon one of these two people came to me and said, "I guess out backups have been failing for about a week. The IT service company has isolated our issue to the fact that we have outgrown the capacity of our current tapes." Immediately we began planning to purchase more tapes to fill the void. They arrived on Monday and I thought they where placed into the rotation to fill the gap so we could get a full backup. We got a partial backup on Monday night the part that would fit on one tape. The second half was scheduled to backup on Tuesday night.
Comments
Very true that no backup system is 100 % reliable. That is why we make a new copy really often. Hopefully often enough to minimize the potential loss. To find out afterwards that everything a database has captured for 3-4 years of business could be at risk if a few hard drives fail at the same time because no other backup exists is just plain scary.
When you think about it, it seems like no back up method is 100% foolproof. I backup our work computer online and on DVDs and hope for the best.
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