Date: 14 Jun 11

Backup and Recovery of Information

The backup of information is a vital process for every small and medium business; this ensures that the recovery process is made far simpler. When the information is crucial or precious, the backing up and ability to recover it becomes even more vital. Companies store a range of personal details of clients, lists of purchases and sales, as well as many other financial documents each and every day. If you were to find that these were gone the next day, what impact would this have on your company’s future? You would need to have some sort of plan that would ensure that all your information could be brought back to you. Things need to be considered in advance in order to protect your company against potential risks.

Many companies work to protect themselves against data loss by using external hard drives and disks to store their information on. This is one of the two techniques most frequently used; the second is online backup and recovery programmes. Many people opt for choosing the external hard drives to store their data on believing that as long as they have an alternative to simply storing the data on their computer, that they are protected. However, just like a computer, these too can suffer damage, especially if a virus is accidentally downloaded. This could potentially contaminate and destroy all the data on the external disks. Online backup is therefore the smartest and most economical method of backing up data, due to the fact that it consistently and regularly backs up your important data in centres that are stored offsite and therefore the information cannot be damaged physically if any accidents happen in the workplace. This is essentially the same method as locking all your data up in a safe elsewhere.

Many companies run computer backups regularly storing all the data on their computers hard drives, this often gives them the false sense of security that they are protecting themselves against data loss. However, your computer is susceptible to many risks including hard drive failures, malwares, Trojans and viruses, theft, fires, electrical damage and vandalism. In many cases some parts of the computer can be replaced and repaired or not completely lost, however, more often than not the data stored on the computer is completely wiped out. Undoubtedly the importance of storing data offsite is evident and needed now more than ever with new threats to computer safety cropping up each day.