Reliable Backup Strategies for Small Business

Small Businesses today use technology and rely on the validity of their data just like the big companies do. However, they do not normally have the budgets to have elaborate tape storage or network storage devices to have multiple versions of customer databases, accounting data or any other bits of information that are important to the overall success of their business.

Most small businesses that experience a serious data loss or catastrophe never fully recover or even stay in business. Events in the past few years like Hurricane Katrina or 9/11, have shown the importance of backup and then securely storing your critical business data outside of your office in a secure storage facility.

Here are some basic recommendations so you can sleep at night, knowing that your data is securely backed up and also that you can confidently restore your data when you ever need to. Remember it is not if you need to restore it is when.

Versioning and Saving

One thing that I have found to be effective in my own backup of files, especially this article, is to save versions of the file as you work. If your document or spreadsheet becomes corrupt for some reason, you can always go back to a previous version. Also, ensure you save often. Nothing worse than having a system crash or freeze and you lose hours of work.

Invest in a Server

Most Small Businesses chose consultants or resellers that rarely show the real value that a server can bring to your organization. Microsoft has priced their Small Business Server so that all Small Businesses can put in a server with email services starting around $3,500.00.

What does a server offer?

A server will provide you with a central and secure system to store your corporate data. Permissions can be set on files to prevent unauthorized access, which could lead to data deletion. Most data loss due to deletion comes from accidental deletion or disgruntled employees that are upset with the owner or management.

Also with a server you will have one place to backup your data to tape or disk, your data is not scattered on your computers all over the network. This will also save you consulting dollars due to the ease of administration.

Windows Servers today come with a service called “Volume Shadow Copy� that will take a snapshot of your data periodically throughout the day, giving you yet another level of backup. You can now recover data from your server without paying those expensive IT consulting bills.

Tape or Disk Based Backup Systems

If your company is using tape or disk (hard drive, CD Rom, or DVD) based backup systems, it is important to ensure that you are doing a full backup every evening. This way if you need to restore from tape or disk, you can feel confident that all your data was backed up the night before.

It is important to ensure that you have a GFS (Grandfather, father, and son) backup system in place, you can do this easily with tape based back ups, you need about 10 tapes to make this happen. I recommend have 4 tapes for the Monday to Thursday backups, 4 or 5 more for each Friday of the month, and then 1 tape for your month end. This is a minimum, you can add more tapes if you wish.

Offsite Media Storage

Storing your backup media offsite is critical to the success of your company. I do not recommend taking this home or leaving it in your car, this is not a secure way to store your business data. There are many organizations that have secure vaults and will charge around $60.00 per month for a basic storage plan. I recommend solutions from Iron Mountain, Kestrel or a local organization, in Calgary we recommend Calgary Archives (http://www.calgaryarchives.com)

Electronic Backup

The next level of protection is electronic offsite storage, this is a backup that is done electronically and sends your critical data across the Internet to the service provider’s secure electronic vault. Your data is compressed and encrypted at your office and then securely transmitted to the service providers. We recommend the services provided by eBackup (www.ebackup.biz). Their services will backup your critical corporate data, your mailboxes on your Small Business Server and your critical customer databases.

Conclusion

The most important thing about any successful backup plan is to ensure you can restore from these backups. Proper and frequent testing of your backup plan will ensure that you can restore from backup in the event of a loss of data or catastrophic disaster such as fire, theft or critical system failure. Remember, you can never have enough backups of files or enough types of backup. Better to be safe than sorry.

Stuart R. Crawford is the Director of Business Development, at IT Matters Inc. (http://www.itmatters.ca), a Microsoft Gold Partner, Small Business Specialist and Microsoft IMPACT Award Finalist 2005 - Network Infrastructure Solution of the Year. He can be reached at [email protected]. Stuart is also a business coach specializing in IT companies with execuCoach International (http://www.execuCoach.net).

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