Rotten Alternatives to Business Backup and Recovery
Your company’s data is its greatest asset. It didn’t just appear, and years of hard work went into putting it together. But what if you came back to the office from a relaxing weekend to find all your data missing? If you have a backup and recovery plan, you might get back to work as quickly as you discovered the problem. If not, this could mean trouble for your business.
There are several ways to backup up your data, but not everyone is safe or equal. If you’ve never heard of a backup and recovery plan, you’ve already picked the first rotten alternative.
Having No Backup and Recovery Plan Is the Worst Plan
Having no backup and recovery plan ensures your data is as safe as it would be if it were all on paper. If your business catches on fire or your equipment is stolen, you have nothing left.
If your equipment malfunctions, you might save pieces of your data by hiring a professional, but there’s no guarantee of anything.
Maintaining Only Local Backups Is Almost as Bad as None
If your company stores backups locally on hard drives and servers, it’s heading in the right direction. But if this is all you’re doing, review the first disastrous scenarios in this blog. Fires and thieves leave you empty handed yet again.
Mechanical hard drive failures won’t decrease productivity because you’ll be able to restore everything from your backups. That is unless your company’s luck is bad and you didn’t regularly conduct or test your backups.
Unlike maintaining no backups, local backups are essential to any plan. They allow employees to get back to work faster than any other solution. They simply need to be plugged in and uploaded.
Believing the Cloud Is an All-in-One Solution Will Decrease Productivity
The Cloud is one of the newest solutions for backing up data, but this doesn’t mean it should be your only solution. While cloud facilities are far less susceptible to disasters, there’s still a chance for losing everything if your data is all in one place.
The biggest problem with using 100-percent cloud storage is the Internet. While Cloud storage is rapidly evolving, Internet reliability and speeds present the greatest barriers for cloud storage’s complete takeover.
Using the Cloud for working on text files is no problem, but data-intensive work, like video editing, reveals the disadvantages of using a data center. Although slowed productivity won’t take your company out, it will affect your bottom line over time.
We Could Go on Forever
Need more ways to sabotage your business’ backup and recovery plan? Our team at Affinity IT has seen it all, so here’s a few fun ideas you should never try at home or in the office:
- Putting backup drives in a waterproof safe and storing them at the bottom of a lake. This solution fails because you can’t easily conduct updates.
- Pulling a Ron Swanson by burying your backups in various hidden locations and committing them to memory. This one fails because who’s going to backup up your mental map?
- Printing out all duplicates of your data and sending them home with trusted employees. This is not only unproductive; you’re killing tons of trees.
We could go on, but we’d rather not waste more time. Instead, let us help you put together the best plan you’ve ever had.
