The importance of data backups

“Our business has been devastated because we haven’t been able to operate for 2 days. Our hosting company had some sort of server problem and our company website is down. To all our clients it looks like we have gone out of business. Worse still we recently placed some new ads with a big emphasis on directing people to our website for more information.”

The above comment is a real quote from a business owner who’s business clearly relied on IT to function. What was even more worrying was a further comment from the business owner in response to being prompted to review their approach to data backups…

“I’m not sure what you mean by ‘reviewing data backups’.”

Any company using IT should ensure they have plans in place and precautions taken so they can recover from events such as server failures, lost\stolen laptops or data, fire, flooding and any other of the many unfortunate things that can happen.

And don’t assume this won’t happen to you. Bank of Ireland, Bord Gais and the HSE are just some of the high-profile cases where data was lost via stolen laptops. I also know of a Dublin based IT company who’s premises fully burnt down as a result of a fire in an adjoining building that was caused by a phone charger shorting out. These things happen all the time! Luckily the IT company mentioned had good disaster recovery plans in place and were not overly effected, their business recovered quickly and continues to function.

Even the big companies are not immune to IT failures but it a huge embarrassment when their disaster recovery plans fail. Danger, a subsidiary of Microsoft, lost a lot of customer data recently…and couldn’t get it back. It is amazing that they did not have effective data backups. They had to post the following apology which is scant consolation for business and personal users affected.

Regrettably, we must inform you that personal information stored on your device — such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos — almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger. Our teams continue to work around-the-clock in hopes of discovering some way to recover this information. However, the likelihood of a successful outcome is extremely low.

Another high-profile case happened just last month. A US cloud storage supplier,SwissDisk, suffered a catastrophic hardware failure resulting in users being unable to access their data. They too had no effective data backups and had to post another embarrassing and damaging statement…

Attention SwissDisk users: We regret to inform you that due to an unplanned and unforeseen catastrophic hardware failure caused by multiple simultaneous events the engineering staff was unable to restore the SwissDisk file server to it’s previous status. We are very sorry for the interruption in service.

Business owners are always told to engage the services of accountants and legal experts. But those relying on IT must consider the impact of a disaster event on their business and I suggest you talk to someone who can give you the advice needed with particular emphasis on disaster recovery and data backups. It is a lot easier to recover when you have the right plans in place. The New York Times posted a good brief overview of disaster recovery last month for those looking for a starting point…the article is here.