How to minimize your chance of data loss
I generally enjoy my job, however, one thing that I don’t enjoy and one thing that never gets easier: someone comes in, desperate, in tears (no kidding), telling me that all their business data is on some machine and it won’t start. They can’t do business without this computer, and THEY DON’T HAVE A BACKUP!
First the hard truth: It is much more likely that data loss will occur if you only have one and only one copy of your data.
Whether it is a thunderstorm that fries your power supply or something as simple as someone accidently spilling coffee onto your laptop, the truth is that all equipment has a finite lifespan, and even without an accident happening, you computer can simply get old and die. Sure, you might have a warranty that’ll replace the physical computer, but what about your data? Isn’t that the most valuable thing on your computer?
Three copies of your data consisting of two local copies on different devices and one copy Off-site
Let’s apply that to the real world.
The internal Hard Drive (or SSD) has the “master” copy of your data. You have an external hard drive that is configured to create a system image (not just file copy) of you laptop back in your Office or Dorm that you plug into every night that makes a full copy of your computer. Once a week, your mission critical data gets backed up to IMC’s datacenter. If those three things are in place, then you have minimized the chance that data loss will occur. If somone spills coffee into your laptop, you’ll still have your data on the backup drive and in IMC’s cloud.
If your computer is in your office and your building floods, gets hit by lighting and burns to the ground, your data is still safe in IMC’s cloud.
Now that you’re all excited, here is how to get protected: Local Backup, RAID, Off-site Backups, Cloud Storage
A local backup drive is one of the best investments you can make in your computing environment, because ALL computer systems have a finite lifespan. All Windows Operating Systems come wth software to recover your information when disaster strikes, you just need to properly configure it and make time for the backup to occur. We can help. As Microsoft Professionals, we’ve used Windows recovery tools to recover all the information from a total loss of the hardware (on multiple ocassions). How foolish would you feel if you lost everything, and the root cause was simply a matter of not setting up a built-in feature designed by the vendor to protect you?
Early in the days of computing, drive failures quickly became a serious threat to computer technology use. If a customer puts all their data on these devices, and the device fails, how do we recover? Some extremely bright people came up with a system by which multiple drives all held part of the other drives’ data, allowing for the system to continue running uninterrupted by a single drive failure, and recovering from that failure was only a matter of inserting a new drive in the system and telling the RAID controller (a specialized piece of hardware) to automatically recreate the failed drive using the parts of the data held on the other drives.
Ok, so you’ve got Local Backups and RAID arrays, but what if your entire facility is destroyed by fire or other natural disaster? This is where Remote Backups come into play. You can buy additional drives and swap them out, taking the local backup drive to a safe deposit box or other offsite storage location, or you can purchase automated remote backups that encrypt your data, store it, report status of the remote backup daily, and allow for restore of the data from your alternate location via the Internet. It’s a great way to address new alternate location capabilities called for by auditors.
Finally, there’s the latest in disaster recovery options, Cloud Storage. With the Microsoft Cloud, we are able to extend Cloud Storage solutions to even the smallest of companies, from day-to-day file storage solutions to hybrid On-Site/Cloud computing to complete Cloud-based computer, storing security configuration, applications, data, and recovery in georedundant data centers.
