Most businesses spend thousands of dollars on hardware maintenance and warranties every year but somehow forget to protect their real assets – the data. Could your business survive a catastrophic data loss due to hardware failure, environmental or other event? Current research shows that most businesses can’t. That’s why National Data Protect’s LiveVault online backup solutions make sense for businesses of all sizes.
Protect your departmental, mail, database, web and other servers with Fortune 500 technology for a small business price.
No matter who’s technology you use - do yourself a favor and do it.
Hi Again, If your disaster planning looks like this:
Then you really need to sit down and take your planning seriously.
Many people think that a disaster plan is so complicated and difficult to implement that (like insurance) they put it off until it’s too late, but it doesn’t have to be.
You can simply plan for what to do in case the building or computer room is shut down, add a few important documents and phone numbers and you can be good to go. Just remember to save your plan someplace you’ll have access to if you need it.
It doesn’t have to be complicated - so create a basic plan today.
Hello again, Here’s something to think about. When you compare the price of our LiveVault service against the cost of your existing solution there are some things to keep in mind.
1. Time: Calculate the cost of the time it takes to change tapes, take them offsite and to confirm the tape’s contents.
2. Equipment: This cost includes the tape drive, software, and tapes. Not to mention the cost of your technical services personnel maintaining the software and hardware. There is no hardware or software cost for National Data Protect’s LiveVault - only the service itself.
3. Recoverability: It’s hard to put a price on this, but how much is it worth to you that your data is guaranteed retrievable vs. the up to 50% failure rate of tapes?
4. Versioning: With tapes, you can most commonly get back up to 10 versions (based on two - one week tape rotation). With our LiveVault service, you can retrieve as many as 136 versions on a 30 day retention plan.
When comparing these costs you will see that is really makes sense to go with a fully automated, secure, and guaranteed solution such as National Data Protect’s LiveVault service.
An important part of protecting your data should include a method to actually destroy the data. Imagine this scenario:
You back up your data daily to a tape and rotate the tapes every two weeks, allowing you to have one week’s worth of tapes off-site. So far so good. After a few cycles you retire the tape set and replace it with a new set so you can be sure that you don’t run into the typical mechanical failures associated with tapes. Now you throw out the old tape set and go home to relax.
It seems good to this point, but there is a potentially huge headache for you. We skipped destroying the data before the media was discarded. Your data can now potentially be read (especially if you didn’t encrypt it) by anyone with a tape drive - and don’t convince yourself that nobody wants to see your data. While the information contained in your backups may not be directly usable, resourceful data thieves may be able to use it to get at more financially rewarding (to them) information.
Basically the point is: Destroy your discarded backup data - you never know who will see it!!!
I’m back! I had an interesting issue occur today that I thought could help you all out.
When you need to recover data that is synchronized between multiple data stores or database types, you have to make sure (in general) that you recover all the data to the same point in time.
For instance, we have a client who runs a Microsoft SQL server that has data which is in sync with Intuit Quickbooks. It took a while to figure out why the custom application was failing, but when we narrowed it down to the mismatched data - the client admitted to us that they restored the QB file alone. The solution was simple - restore both to the same point in time and we were good to go.
The lesson here is to document the recovery requirements from an application and operations perspective, don’t just rely on having all your data backed up.
Hello Everyone, We’ve added a funformational video about backups starring John Cleese (of Monty Python fame). Check it out, it’s onthe front page of the National Data Protect website… Just click the play button on the front page and enjoy. Thanks! John
Recently, I’ve been asked about various methods of backup and why perform one versus another. To make it a little more clear, I’d like to explain why a strategy of layered protection can be the most effective way to guarantee your ability to restore the data you need relatively quickly.
The first layer (and arguably the most important) is to make sure your data is sent off-site. Keeping your data at least 50 miles away from your main location will protect you from failures that involve environmental factors such as severe weather, blackout / brownout, building failures (cooling, electrical, etc…) and even flooding and fire.
The second layer is to keep your data on a locally accessible device that will allow you to quickly recover from local hardware failures. This protects you from server hardware failures such as drive crashes, fried motherboards and even slips of the finger.
Finally, the third layer is to include file versioning. Considering that several kinds of malware can attach themselves to your files (executable and non-executable) and be subsequently backed-up, you want to be able to roll back your files to a point before the infection.
When you implement a recovery solution that includes all of these features, it is difficult to imagine a scenario where you can’t restore the data you need.
Fortune Names Iron Mountain One of America’s Most Admired Companies for Diversified Outsourcing
Published annually by Fortune the Most Admired List serves as the definitive report card on corporate reputation. Executives, directors, and analysts from 622 companies in 65 industries were asked to rate companies in their own industry on eight criteria – innovation, people management, use of corporate assets, social responsibility, quality of management, financial soundness, long-term investment and quality of products/services.
