Richard's Blog » The importance of backups
The importance of good backups was driven home to me again recently when our tape drive failed and I had to replace it. I decided that it was time to upgrade our tape drive to a newer model with greater capacity as recently our backups have been requiring more than one tape. I purchased a reasonable second hand tape drive through Trademe.
This drive can backup 200 gigabytes of data (or 400 gigabytes of compressed data) which is quite a step up on our previous drive which did 20gb (40gb compressed). The cost of the tape drive and some new tapes to go with it was a little under $1000.00. Well worth the expense when the alternative is possibly not being in business!
However, our backup regime involves creating an End of Month tape on the final Friday of each month. This tape is stored for a minimum of 12 months off site. By doing this we are assured of never losing more than one month of data should we have a disaster that wipes out our computer system (a fire for example). We also have the ability to recover data from the previous 12 months should we ever have the need to.
To ensure that I can recover data from these tapes I had to purchase a replacement tape drive of the same type that failed - also from Trademe! Fortunately the cost of this wasn't huge as it is a fairly old model of drive - but then what is the cost of not being able to restore data when you have to?
It is impossible to over stress how important backups are to a business. Most people are aware of this at some sort of vague "I must backup my data" level and have good intentions of backing up but somehow rarely get around to doing it. All businesses should backup their data regularly and should store these backups off site. To do otherwise puts your business at risk.
There is ample research to show that a high percentage of businesses never recover after a major disaster such as a fire. Around 40% will never re-open and 30% of those that do will be out of business within two years. Can you afford that?
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