data recovery

Is Your Company Data at Risk? A Guide to Data Backup and Recovery

November 18, 2024

Picture coming to work one day and discovering all your essential business files – client data, financial records, project documents – are gone. Data loss can happen for many reasons: accidental deletion, hardware failures, cyberattacks, and even natural disasters. It’s not something anyone anticipates, but every business is at risk, and a solid data backup and recovery plan is crucial.

Research shows that nearly 60% of small businesses close within six months after major data loss. Backing up data means creating secure copies of your files that can be restored if something goes wrong.

Why Backups Matter

Data backups protect your business from:

Accidents: Deleting important files by mistake.
Hardware Failures: When devices crash, data stored only on that device is at risk.
Cyber Threats: Ransomware and other attacks that can lock you out of your data.
Compliance Needs: In many industries, data retention is required by law.

Steps to build your backup and recovery plan

First, identify critical data. List the essential files and databases you need to protect – think customer records, finances, and project information.

Next, select a backup method. On-site backups store data on local storage It is quick but can be vulnerable to physical risks like fires, hardware failures and environmental factors.

Cloud backups keep your data off-site, usually with a cloud provider like Amazon. This protects it from local threats and makes it accessible anywhere.

The downside to cloud-only backups is recovery. In the event of a catastrophic failure, such as a failed server, your data must be downloaded from the cloud, which can take days depending on how large your data set is.

Hybrid backups combine on-site and cloud options. It offers the best of both worlds – protecting your data from a local disaster, but also providing quick recovery in the event of data loss.

Automate backups

Automated backups save time and reduce the risk of forgetting. Humans get busy, forget, or procrastinate – automated backup software will run when it is supposed to, and alert if there’s a failure.

Test your backups

Regularly check your backups to ensure you can recover data if necessary. Years ago when tape backups were in use, we were called in to help an accounting firm that suffered a server failure and wasn’t able to get help from their “IT guy.”

The office manager was diligent about changing their backup tapes every day, up to keeping a log and checklist next to the server.

However, the old IT company never actually checked the backups. There was an error nearly a year before that had prevented any backups running properly for 11 months.

Plan for recovery

Outline steps for restoring data, who’s responsible, and the expected timeframe to minimize downtime during a crisis. It is vitally important you understand the true time to recover in the event of a disaster.

If you’re ready to improve your data backup and recovery, reach out to our team for guidance. We can help create a plan that keeps your business secure and your data accessible, no matter what happens.

What Is Data Retention? Why Do I Need It?

May 23, 2018

If you are in the medical or legal industry, regulations require you to retain data and records for a certain period of time. The data retention process was a little more clear-cut back when it was only files and sheets of papers in brown boxes that you stored in the attic or the basement.

However, in today’s time, almost everything is in digital form, whether it’s stored locally on a file server, external hard drives, or in the cloud.

This data needs to be secure and easily accessible in the event you need to retrieve any of it. Depending on how much data you have, there are many options.

The one thing you do not want to do is buy a cheap hard drive, move your data over to it, and think you’re safe.

If you only have one copy of that data and you move it to a new location, that is your only copy. You want to have your data saved in more than one location or a mirror copy of it saved.

A business might want to consider a local or cloud server with a RAID setup so that there is a copy of your copy. It creates a copy of your data so that, in the event of a hardware failure or data corruption, the data can be restored from the second copy.

The first copy would be returned to the last version, like nothing happened to it.

If you are a larger business and/or deal with medical or financial information, it would be very wise to utilize data encryption for the stored data.

However, every business should create a data retention policy and follow it. Categorize documents and images, then specify how long the data is to be retained.

Make sure all employees and IT professionals with access to company and client data know and adhere to this policy.

The main thing to keep in mind is the type and quality of hardware that is used. It’s great to have a data retention policy in place and follow it exactly, but if your data gets corrupted, stolen, or a hard drive fails, the policy does you no good.

The key to a rock-solid data retention policy starts with having a robust backup solution in place as well.

The backup solution can either be a cloud-based system or an on-site enterprise storage device or server with a proper RAID setup.

Here at Tech Experts, we can assist you with establishing a file server with the correct RAID configuration to ensure that the retained data is safe and secure, with encryption and redundancy built in. Cloud based image backups are also a great way to ensure the safety of your data.

We can also start you on a managed service plan for monitoring and maintenance of that server and your other workstations, laptops, printer, and VoIP phone systems.

Wherever you decide to store your data, make sure that enterprise hardware and security measures are used to ensure that your data will remain intact.

Data Redundancy And Why You Should Have It

July 13, 2017

Ron Cochran is a senior help desk technician for Tech Experts.

Data redundancy is the making of an exact copy of the data that you are currently working with, in the event of a hardware failure, theft, or those pesky mistakes where you delete something that you really wanted.

What happens is you will have 1 or more hard-drives used for backups, housing those files that are kept nearly current. You will go through the steps to rebuild or restore the files or programs that were removed, then you will be back at the point you were at before the files were lost.

The above is extremely important when you are working with money or medical records. Let’s say you were working with a customer on their tax returns and your office experienced a power outage, which turns your computer off in the middle of saving data. A short while later, the power is restored and you turn your computer on and open the data to resume where you left off — and you find out that there is no record on your computer of your client and you start to panic.

If you had a redundant data solution, then you could restore the data, but if you didn’t, then you will need to call that customer and explain that they will need to bring all of that data back in so you can enter it into your system again. Now, consider how this customer could begin to think of you and your business.

If you have a safety net, you would follow the steps from your program and, in a short while, all of that data that you lost will be restored and you’ll be back at the point when the power went out, with all of your data intact. There are several different ways you can set up a system backup. One of the ways is to have more than one storage solutions to send data to.

With this solution, you will have more than one drive that is saving that information, which will do a couple of things. It will speed up the read/write times and you take less of a chance of losing more data. It’s always wise to have more than one solution for data recovery. You don’t want to wait until it’s too late and find out that in order to recover the data on your drive it’s going to be thousands of dollars.

You can have an image copy of your hard-drive made one time a day (or once a week or maybe twice a month) with a scheduled back up. You could have an application running in the background of your computer that would take up very few resources as it copies your data to a drive or an offsite storage facility.

We offer quite a few different data redundancy solutions to our clients. Those options range from on-site RAID drives to a cloud-based solution that is off-site. With either option, you can have a data backup or an image of your operating system — or even a direct mirror copy of your hard-drive in real time.

If you are worried that you might lose valuable information, then some sort of data redundancy is probably something you should be actively seeking. If you’re overwhelmed by the options and aren’t exactly sure which method would suit your business best, contact us and we can help you narrow it down, as well as provide a solution.