Pop Quiz:

If your server suddenly crashed and ALL your data was erased, how long would it take before your business was back up and running as usual?

If you aren’t sure, or if you think it would only be a short period of time, read on.

Below are 3 common, costly misunderstandings most business owners have about their data backup that give them a false sense of security:

Misunderstanding #1: Believing That Tape Backups Are A Reliable Way To Secure Your Data. Wrong! Tape backups have an average failure rate of 100% (no, that’s not a typo). What makes this even worse is that tape backups will APPEAR to be working, giving you a false sense of security.

Misunderstanding #2: Backing Up Your Data Will Allow You To Restore Your Network To Its Original State, Quickly And Easily. Wrong again!  Having just a copy of your data doesn’t guarantee this at all. To help you understand, let me give you a simple analogy…

Let’s suppose we made an exact replica of all the items in your house right now and put them offsite in a storage facility – that’s a backup of your “data.” If your house burned to the ground (God forbid!) we would have to rebuild the HOUSE (which is the server, software and supporting environment) BEFORE we could restore all your items back from the storage facility. Obviously that takes some time. That’s why simply having an offsite copy of your data doesn’t guarantee you’ll be back up and running FAST. It could take several days – possibly weeks – before everything was restored; and that’s assuming you HAVE the data in a clean state and all the originally installed software disks.

Misunderstanding #3: Trusting Their Backup Is Automatically Working Without Doing Periodic Test Restores. I see this happening a LOT – a business owner thinks their backups are working because they don’t see any error messages or apparent problems. Then, when they need to restore a file, they discover the backups stopped working MONTHS ago and all that data is gone.

“Hope” Is NOT A Good Strategy When It Comes To Backing Up Your Data!

Don’t get caught off-guard with a faulty backup. If you have any doubts about your data backup, please let us know and we will send a friendly, knowledgeable technician to your office to review your current backup system and report on just how fast you could be back up and running again.