Data is the lifeblood of your company

• Mail, Databases (SQL, Exchange, etc), Records, Invoices, Presentations, Contracts, etc: everything is ‘data’

The amount of data created by the average user/company is increasing exponentially.
According to Contingency Planning Research & Strategic Research Corporation:

• 43% of U.S. companies experiencing disasters never re-open, and 29% close within 2 years.
• 43% of lost or stolen data is valued at $5 million.
• Most companies value 100MB of data at more than $1million.

The loss of revenue for each hour of downtime varies from industry to industry

What’s your cost of downtime ?

Don’t wait to find out !

For starters, any backup is better than no backup. But if you’re planning to start off safeguarding your data, you might as well do it right. Typical options are:
Backup options:

• Back up to removable media (CD/DVD/USB)
  • while this might work for really small amounts of data, it is not automatic (relies on human intervention). Typically, you take a full backup each time (not just the changes), and most importantly, the data is still on-site. In case of a disaster, your backups are of little help!
• Back up to tape
  • Enough has been written about the pitfalls of tape backups – from people running into burning buildings to recover tapes they never bothered sending offsite to stolen tapes with credit card details to tape deterioration that was discovered when a customer needed to restore his data. Besides, tape restores are cumbersome and require sys admin intervention even if all you want is to restore a single file before that meeting in the afternoon.
• Back up to an on-site machine (backup server)
  • Certainly an improvement! As long as you have the right software, you should be able to backup automatically, incrementally and securely, and restore painlessly and quickly. But bear in mind that your data is still ‘on-site’. In case of a natural disaster / calamity / theft / vandalism, that’s of no help unless you’re replicating your data to a remote server…
• Back up to a remote server (online backup)
  • The safest of the lot since your data is off-site and there is a online backup service provider focused on facilitating your backup & restore operations.