Helping your business to do more business
Saturday, 28 May 2011
When was the last time you backed up your data? What would happen to your business if your computer failed and you lost your data? The second is a thought provoking question, which I hope you can answer.
For one of our clients having a decent backup became a very real issue.
A few weeks ago we had some thunderstorms in our area which adversely affected our client, who as a result decided to reboot both of their servers. One server is quite old and runs Windows Small Business Server 2003, while the other was installed last year and has the company accounts on it which must also be accessed remotely from a satellite office.
This incident led the customer to question how good their backup was, and the next day I was asked to look into it for them. I quickly discovered that the backup of the older server was taking an unnacceptably long time, most likely caused by communication issues with the device the server was backing up to (a disk drive attached to the network). Whilst the newer server was backing up to the same device with no issues whatsoever.
This led me to change the backup strategy, and resulted in the backup of the older server taking under an hour, as opposed to the days that it was taking before. I also introduced some scripts which renamed backup files allowing them to be archived for a period of time, unlike the previous system which overwrote the backup file each time.
These changes ended up being implemented in a very timely manner, as within two weeks of having established the new strategy, disaster occurred. One morning the staff came in to the office and found that they could not log into their network, investigation showed that the older server was reporting an error and could not boot into Windows. A call to Dell (the supplier of the server) quickly established that a card within the server had failed and a replacement was ordered.
In the mean time with the staff unable to login to their computers the business was effectively stalled and could do nothing, although a temporary paper based system was quickly implemented. However, with the newer server unaffected, access to the accounting system was soon established and business soon got back to normal.
The new part arrived the next day and was quickly fitted to the server which was restarted without incident. But always in the back of our mind was the concern that one or more of the disks was also affected which would have meant reinstalling Windows Small Business Server, at which point having a good backup would have been essential - fortunately we had them but didn't need them.
Having a decent backup is essential for every business, it is a vital insurance policy against disaster, whether that is a hardware failure as in this case, theft, fire, flood or a coffee spill. It is inevitable that even if you experience no other issue, your computer hardware will eventually fail, how would you cope? To finish I'll ask the question I started with, what would happen to your business if your computer failed and you lost your data?