Have you ever had a computer, laptop, server, or phone crash on you to find out that you didn’t back up your data? As you’re getting a new computer, laptop, server, or phone you have no data to transfer over. Just like any other disaster when something goes wrong you immediately try and call around to get whatever is broken back up again.
Well in a recent case we had with one of our now clients their server crashed. They had called their current I.T. provider but their provider wasn’t available to address the issue. The first thing we assessed was their backups. They had setup a physical backup and a cloud backup. All looked great, but when we dug deeper into the backups to confirm their data was there, it showed their backup had not been backing up for several months.
About 6 months ago the backup had a corrupt file and since then anything that it tried to back up was not backing up successfully. Which means that when there is a disaster, like a server crash, we were unable to retrieve their data to put back onto the server to get it back up and running. Imagine if there was not backup at all!
Sure you could restore their data from 6 months ago, but that will leave the client with having to manually enter in data for the last 6 months. Sure we would setup new backup solutions that check daily or even hourly for a successful backup, but that solution wasn’t going to help the client at this very moment. When we say that having a proper backup solution is very vital to your business, we mean it!
Having a proper backup solution will save your business time and money. You may think that your backup is properly setup and that it is backing up all your files, but how would you know if you don’t assess your situation often enough? Technology is not meant to set it and forget it. Do your due diligence and have a 3rd party vendor assess your backups and ensure they are working. In this particular case you can’t rely on your current I.T. Vendor to do it for you if they failed to check it 6 months ago.
And if you don’t have a backup at all. We highly suggest you get one. Technology equipment fail all the time, and the last thing you want is to not have any data that you worked so hard to accumulate over time to just vanish. This applies to your computer, laptop, server, or cell phone. When is the last time you checked to see what you were backing up and if the backup was successful?