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Have You Backed Up Your Data?
Story # 1: A Mothers Pain
A mother, who shall remain nameless, brought in a very old system to us and said it wasn't working. It was obvious to us right away that she was in dire distress over it and that was confirmed as she told us she'd been doing digital photography since the earliest days of it's inception and ALL her pictures of her children since they were young, now teenagers, were on this machine.She further stated that she had no backup what so ever, not even old floppy disks.We did our best to reassure her and told her drive failure was only one possible cause and even in that eventuality drives usually didn't fail totally and so data recovery was a good bet. Now I don't know how you feel but this sort of loss and a business losing it's data are 2 very different things. In the absolute worst case scenario, if data loss forces a business to fail and close it's people will find other jobs and move on with their lives. That's rare because businesses usually resort to data labs which are usually successful, if expensive, and so the business goes on.So while we normally put forth our very best efforts for businesses as a lot of people are dependent on that business, we took this one to heart. One is business, the other is someone's life.It didn't take us 30 seconds after hooking the machine up to know we were in trouble. "Drive Not Found" said the bios. We spent over a week using every trick we knew or had heard of to jump start the drive and retrieve her pictures. We purchased additional tools at a cost of several hundred dollars, made phone calls and took the drive to a have a data recovery specialist look at it quickly. Sadly, all to no avail. The recovery specialist told us it needed a data lab.When the customer returned with her husband we locked the doors, put up the Closed sign, sat her on our office couch and gave her the bad news.As expected she succumbed to tears and wept.As she calmed a bit we explained options and possible costs to her husband. With her profuse thanks, they left.We later heard they had taken out a second mortgage and paid a five figure sum (Not including cents) to retrieve her pictures
Story # 2: Opps
Several years ago I walked into this organization after being asked to look over their setup. This organization is small, 2-4 people depending on when and deals with retraining workers and reemployment issues. I quickly realized the volume of data they created , the diversity of it and how crucial never losing anything was. However, despite large numbers of user created files it didn't require massive storage in terms of drive size totaling less than 3 gigs. I began to preach the Backup Mantra to them and as minor blips here and there caused them problems we began them on the backup road beginning with a simple once a week burn to CD , then moving to copying to rotating flash drives to make it "easier but still cheap". As is normal in these sorts of offices it wasn't a priority so it went by the wayside soon enough as I knew it would. So in early 2007 we configured some attached storage and a real backup program to do daily incremental and weekly full backups. They told me they wouldn't ever need to keep files more than a year due to the fiscal process but having spent a lifetime in business I set it to keep all backups for 3 years. In late 2007 they began working on a grant application for retraining funds which they completed in early 2008.Ten months later they called me in panic, the grant was under serious renewed consideration and they'd "somehow" deleted the folder all the grant work had been stored in but they had no clue when and though they'd looked at the attached storage drive there were just files they did not recognize there and their data was nowhere to be found. Hundreds of individuals retraining programs could be adversely impacted. The economy had just melted down, layoffs were beginning and they were under the gun. As a result of a well thought out backup plan we were able to retrieve not only their data but also related deleted emails and we did so in about 20 minutes after arriving onsite.
Story #3: Runaway Freight Train
This company had purchased and began working with their first computers 2 years prior to us getting involved. They are a large private company by any measure and employ dozens of people. They do business nationally and in 2 short years 70-80% of their business had moved to email, receiving orders, invoicing & billing, communications and marketing just to begin with. We were asked to come in to do a simple checkup and tune up of their existing systems. Less than 5 minutes observation in their offices led us to interrupt with our 2nd question, "What are you doing for backups?" which was met with mumbles. We then asked "How bad would it be if you lost your emails or quick books data?" Again, silence albeit this time with an evil eye. "There's your priority" we said "And it doesn't have to be prohibitively expensive" which was met with a collective sigh of relief.
Here's The Rub
Technology has improved and come down in price. Network attached storage is cheap and their are some great, inexpensive or free backup programs out there which will protect your data and hence your business. Overall cost is dependent on the number of users and complexity of data and systems. For the above company a somewhat older system was stripped down and relegated to service as a file server using data synchronization software resulting in duplicate data sets residing in multiple locations. It's possible but highly doubtful they'll all go at once. Next step of course is and should be an offsite solution either via a VPN or carried tapes.
If you're not doing backup of some sort you're playing with a ticking time bomb. Anything man makes will break sooner or later. Drives fail, buildings burn down, data gets lost. How important is your data to you?