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Backup Disaster Recovery Planning: The Basics

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20160121

Having a backup disaster recovery plan in place is crucial to the long-term success and survival of your business.

A backup disaster recovery plan is crucial to the survival of a business. The odds of a business surviving a major disaster without a plan are pretty low, and it’s impossible to know when a disaster will strike. It’s the unpredictability that makes disasters the most dangerous. If something terrible happened tomorrow, would you be ready? If not, you better get started. Here are some important things to consider as you create your backup disaster recovery plan.

Data recovery

One of the primary focuses of your backup disaster recovery plan should pertain to how you will recover your data. Where is your data right now? How will it be restored to your system and whose job will it be? Does that person know how to do that? Do they need practice? This is also a really good time to take a look at how you backup your data. Having a plan to recover data is pointless if the backup data doesn’t exist. Make sure that your backups are current, and saved in several reasonable places. At least one copy should be off-site in case of a natural disaster. Make sure that you do have easy access to the data as well.

Communication

The quality and efficiency of the communication during a disaster has a huge effect on how everything turns out. It’s important to make sure that your disaster recovery plan includes specifics about how communication should happen during a disaster. Will a chain of command be formed? Will certain people have certain jobs? What happens if a part of the plan goes wrong? The key to a strong plan is to think of everything, or at least as much as possible.

Education and practice

A disaster recovery plan is completely useless if nobody knows what to do. Make sure to educate your employees about the details of the plan. Each employee should, at the very least, know exactly what they are responsible for. This will look different for every company. A great way to make sure that everyone knows what’s going on is a series of seminars or classes, but memos might work better for some. Just do whatever works best for your staff.

Once everybody knows what they’re doing, do a couple of practice rounds. Run through different parts of the plan. This will be a good chance to catch any mistakes and find out if someone isn’t quite sure what to do. Believe it or not, the practice rounds are almost as important as the training sessions.

Testing

You can consider the practice rounds to be tests also if you’d like, but it’s important that you have a chance to evaluate the recovery plan. There will probably be holes here and there. Do you have too many people doing that, but not enough doing this? Maybe there’s a task that needs a certain skill set that isn’t available in the staff that have been assigned to it. Using the results of the test runs, tweak your plan to make it exactly what your company needs.

Continuity

The goal of all of this is to maintain continuity as much as possible. Of course, immediately after the disaster, you’ll probably have to close, but you want to open again as soon as possible. There are several reasons for this, but the main reason is that you need to be able to take care of the customers that are depending on you. A lack of continuity is the fastest way to lose customers.

Have more questions about your backup disaster recovery plan? Contact us. We’re happy to answer all of your questions and help you with anything that you need.

Data Backup for Businesses

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Implementing a data backup plan can protect your company from accidental data loss or natural disaster.

Implementing a data backup plan can protect your company from accidental data loss or natural disaster.

You should implement a data backup and recovery plan in order to protect your company’s data. Backing up files protects against accidental data loss and natural disasters. When creating a plan, consider the following factors:

 

 

 

 

  • How important the data is
  • The kind of information the data contains
  • How frequently the data changes
  • How quickly you need to recover the data
  • The type of equipment you need
  • The best time to schedule backups
  • Where you need to store backups
  • Differential backup is a process that starts with one full backup, and then backs up all changes that have occurred since the previous full backup. This allows for much quicker backups and makes more efficient use of your storage capacity.
  • Incremental backup is very similar to differential backup, but is different in one important way in that after the initial full backup, subsequent backups store changes that have been made since the previous backup cycle.
  • Mirror backup is a real-time duplicate of the source you back up. With mirror backups, when you delete a file in the source that file is eventually also deleted in the mirror backup. Because of this, you should use mirror backups carefully.

Cloud backup solutions focus on copying data files to a physically remote location, but hybrid backup combines cloud backup and local backup to deliver system recovery, disaster recovery, and file restores. The local backup is usually a USB drive or network shared drive. The best hybrid backup solution integrates these forms of backup in an automatic, easy to use utility that runs invisibly in the background. While local backups are typically enough for protecting your data and other information on a computer system, the cloud backup adds an extra level of assurance.

According to the United States Small Business Administration, twenty-five percent of businesses never recover from a natural or manmade disaster. You can, however, design a plan that protects against worst case scenarios by implementing at least 2 backup strategies. A couple of fantastic choices are the Cloud and Sneakernet.

Cloud backup is a strategy for backing up your data by sending a copy of it over a proprietary or public network to an off-site server. A third-party typically hosts the server and charges you a fee based on bandwidth, number of users, or capacity. Choosing a reliable network solutions provider with a good track record can ensure that your data is available even after a major disaster.

A Sneakernet system is the channel by which your electronic information transmits from 1 computer to another. The transmission methods include carrying it on a floppy disk, CD or other removable medium. It provides basic website and email access to anybody anywhere regardless of the telecommunications infrastructure.

Network-attached storage synchronization allows you to bring data backups home with you daily if necessary. It works particularly well if you are a sole proprietor or a very small business. But, that arrangement is not appropriate if your organization grows and the demands of running a business increase. If your business has several office locations, you can deploy two compatible network-attached storage devices at each location, and set them to synchronize or back up to each other over the network. Today practically every new NAS model does this. Look for NAS devices that support block-level sync, which conserves bandwidth by transmitting only the changed portions of a file.

A managed service provider can monitor your existing systems and, when the time is right, help you migrate to better ones. They can also provide support and repair services on a time and material basis when you need it.

For more information please contact us.