Backups

All you need to know about backups can be put into one sentence. Take them regularly, take them offsite and periodically test your recovery procedures. You don't need to read any further, but if you’re not convinced carry on.

Following a catastrophic loss of data it is believed nearly 80% of companies never recover and go out of business. How would your company cope with such a loss due to fire, flood, theft, equipment failure or some other cause?

How would you cope with the loss of:

• Customer details.
• Supplier details.
• Records of who:
  • You owe money to.
  • Who owes you money.
• Prospects and their needs.
• Intellectual Property i.e. process details.
• What stock you just lost.
• What work was in progress.
• Insurance details.

Backups of your data are essential, as is ensuring that those backups are accessible in the event of a loss. Having the data in a fire safe under a few tons of very hot rubble for an extended period of time is not very useful. Older fire safes were meant for paper and valuables. Modern media will become unusable well below the temperature of the flash point of paper. Other things matter as well i.e. how long is the fire safe going to keep your media from harm? Who has the keys or are they kept in a (wooden) desk near the fire safe. Will the locking mechanism allow you to unlock the safe?

OK so now we're taking backups of our data and we're storing them off site. When was the last time you tried to restore the data to a different system (i.e. simulating a new system following your simulated fire). Do you have a copy of the software used to backup the data; is the data in a standard format; is it encrypted; who holds the encryption keys; can you still buy a new drive that will read the data from the media you are using?

Now we've installed our replacement hardware in our new or temporary premises how long is it going to take to get the new systems online? Is it just a matter of copying the files back to a new directory or do we need to be configuring a whole load of patches and upgrades to our line of business package before the data is going to be reloaded? Can you use the latest version of the business package you've just purchased or were you several revisions behind on your operational systems and a totally different database structure. Is all this going to take an hour, a day, or will it take weeks?

Now what about the process and the media, what are the needs of the business? Does it need a few files on a memory stick or a system for rotating and replacing things when they wear out? What is the predicted lifetime for your media and how do you test that everything is working properly? Do you need multiple backup locations such that in the case of normal data loss i.e. someone accidentally deletes something, it can be replaced quickly and easily?

Do you need a snapshot of your current data? Is there legislation that requires you to keep records for a very long time? If there is can you still read the records that are 20 or 50 years old (Life policies are an example of these long time frames – what would be your strategy in these cases)? What if you contract some kind of malicious virus with a payload which very slowly damages your data so that when you go back to your records for a clients annual review the records are scrambled? How do you replace them?

What if you have decided to use an online provider for your backups and have been using them for several years and the company is sold or goes out of business? There’s recent history of this happening where an online provider lost the data for several thousands of their customers. How do you ensure your providers health? Review their Accounts history? Follow up references? Visit their facilities? Or do you find multiple unrelated providers and double or treble up. What if they all use the same third party data centre, how will you know? If you don’t do all this analysis and due diligence how will you know your data is safe?