Computer Solutions - Data Backup and Recovery

129 Main St. - Fivemiletown - Co. Tyrone - Northern Ireland

Disaster recovery is a subject that most business owners never think about. The computers always just work. That is one of the biggest mistakes a company can make. We all run into this situation eventually. A hard drive will fail, a server will go down, or there will be a fire or flood in the office. That is when the issue of recovery is taken seriously. But at that point it may be too late!

Small and medium sized businesses are more and more dependent on their computer systems and stored data from financial records to priceless sensitive customer information. You have worked hard to build your systems up to the point they are now. Where would you be if you lost all your information? How long would it take to manually enter all your data into your systems?

"In early 2005, Small Business Pipeline conducted a survey on small business disaster recovery, which found:

28% of small businesses back up data only in their office
24% don’t have any disaster recovery plan
20% have off-site data backup and full business continuity plans
16% back up data to an off-site facility
12% back up data to a third-party off-site facility

Thirty five percent of small business owners ranked disaster recovery as equally important as other business functions such as customer service, technology operations, finance, and accounting. However, there was still a total of 52 percent of small business owners that had no disaster recovery plan, compared to 49 percent in 2004."*

There are two key components in any recovery plan:

What data can't I live without
How will I store the data in case of a disaster

The first thing to do is determine what data is critical to your operations. This is the data that you need to make sure is backed up. This data needs to be backed on a regular basis to ensure it is current and minimizes the amount of data lost in a worst case scenario.

Two technologies are especially suitable for small businesses. Part of this plan needs to take into account keeping your antivirus, antispyware, and firewalls running and updated.

*Content quoted from Symantec website.