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| Your business in a lunch box... | |
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Imagine coming home from holiday, putting your key in the lock and when the door swings open - everything you expected to see just as you left it - is gone.
Not just the expensive things like the TV and the stereo, not just the sentimental, irreplacable family photos, but everything; carpets, light fittings, taps...the lot. It's as if the whole place has been stripped by locusts.
This allegedly happened to a woman thanks to a bogus posting on an internet site which invited anyone and everyone to help themselves to her house contents while she was away. And they did...right down to the doors and window panels. You've got to hope that she was insured; research shows that the contents of the average UK home are worth £44,500 whereas the average sum insured is £35,000. That's most of us under-insured by 21%.
If we're this cavalier with our homes and just one computer glitch can see Fred from next door disappearing off with your stereo tucked under his arm, what can we do to protect our businesses, which for most of us these days are entirely reliant on storing data on computers?
The first thing to do is get into the habit of doing regular back ups. In the same way that you wouldn't spend money downloading music without burning a hard copy of it, it pays to take regular 'copies' of your business data in case you need it. Sadly, just as the holiday nightmare woman discovered, with one push of a button you can loose everything. If this happens to business data - it's enough to destroy a business and shut it down completely.
So back ups are important to say the least. But what is the best way to back up your essential business information?
Until recently, tape was the most reliable way to back up. The problem is, the storage capacity of tapes hasn't kept up with the increasing computer of somputer systems, both in terms of performance and cost. That means back ups that are taking a very long time (we're talking hours here) while the information is compressed and if you have more information than the tape can hold, you will of course have to switch the tape over once the first tape is full. Cost wise, you're looking at a minimum of £800 for the unit and five tapes, it requires a technical installation and the equipment to be shutdown for a period of time.
So it's not hard to see why external drives are taking over; they have a greater initial capacity which means that the files don't have to be processed and compressed and you can back up the same amount of information in less than half the time a tape will take. Not only that, but with the increased capacity it's much less likely that you will fill the drive up and need a second unit to complete the back up - unlike tapes. They are also easily connected and set up (no installation charges there then) and you don't have to shut everything else down while you set it up.
Cost wise at present, 500GB drives are around the £120 mark, making the initial outlay for a five day rotation £600, but that's falling all the time as drive size is increasing - so it's still the cheaper than tapes and finally - it's portable too. You can fit all of your business information into a unit small enough to pack into a lunch box.
Why is that important? Suppose there was an office flood and everything was a foot under water. You'd be able to go to the back of the car (or wherever you hide your portable drive), plug it into virtually any Microsoft Windows based machine and read the information directly. Bingo - you just moved offices with no data loss and virtually no down time at all.
If you were using tapes however, you would need a tape -drive to accomplish the same feat. You'd have to wait for a tape unit to arrive and be installed before you could restore your data. Not so speedy...and pretty costly too.
So it seems external drives are the way forward. Here at TLP we are also researching additional back up solutions. If you'd like to talk to us about making the switch to external drives, click here to contact us.
Next month: alternative back up solutions.
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