Archive for the ‘Disaster Recovery’ Category

Disaster Recovery: are you prepared?

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

It’s never “if” your hard drive fails it’s “when”. Be prepared for the eventuality. It is not enough to run nightly backup routines and keep them on the company premises. Data must be stored ‘offsite’ in medium that can quickly be restored.
What If the worst of the worst happened to your business’s location and it was no longer there?
Your plan should include:

1. A Temporary Location
2. Hardware: Computers, Laptops, Printers, etc…
3. Software necessary to your company’s daily operation.

Also consider the size of your organization, it may be necessary to create plans and procedures for each department.

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What if your hard-drive fails?

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

Your hard-drive won’t boot up. You need all the information off your hard-drive to keep your business running. What do you do?

Right Answer: Find a data recovery expert who can retrieve the information for you.

Wrong Answer: Mess around with it and possibly damage the hard-drive.

Experts have different tools and software programs to retrieve the data. If there is no damage to the hard-drive, your cost will be much more reasonable. If you do something wrong and overwrite the data it makes it more difficult to retrieve, which in turn will make the cost of retrieving the data go up.

In the case of a hard-drive being damaged, you are looking at a much higher cost. When a hard-drive is damaged, it will need to be taken apart in what is called a clean room –a sterile environment that is expensive to rent. So before doing anything “creative” with that crashed hard-drive, think twice. You don’t want to pay a lot of extra money if you don’t need to.

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Is your data safe in the event of a catastrophic event?

Friday, May 8th, 2009

Imagine this: You drive into work one day only to discover that a fire has decimated your office building.  After the initial concern for employee safety, property loss and other thoughts that race through your head, you need to consider the safety and status of your company, client, financial and e-mail data.  Do you have a disaster recovery plan in place to successfully handle an event like this?  If you have never or even rarely discussed backups or disaster recovery plans, then it is quite possible you have lost all of your company data and quite possibly your business.  It is a dreadful place to be, but it can be avoided by developing a plan that works for your business.

If you rely on computer-based data to run your business, a disaster recovery plan is crucial to its continuation after a disaster.  This includes:

  • server and computer backups
  • a backup schedule to fit your company’s needs
  • protocol for who handles the backups and verifies logs to monitor
  • for backup failures
  • a planned schedule to test the data restore to ensure that
  • backups are functioning correctly
  • a plan for off-site storage and rotation of the backups
  • a list of crucial equipment that must procured to re-establish
  • business operations
  • an alternate location for offices

There is a great deal to consider when developing a disaster recovery plan.  You can not weather a catastrophe like this without being prepared to rebuild.  It is very important that an IT expert walks you through a strategy-development process that works for your company.  Knowing your data is safe ensures the ability to rebuild after a total loss.

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