Do you know how you can ruin everything you have achieved in your business or SME?
It is very easy, if you do not know that you should have, or do not worry about having, correct backup copies of your information, sooner or later you will lose the most valuable of your business: the information.
Sometimes due to ignorance, or not having enough time, this important point is overlooked, or we postpone it, until the disaster occurs.
How to have a good backup plan for your business information?
The best option is to go to an expert company in backup solutions. A good backup plan is built on 4 pillars. It does not matter if it is about protecting a single program or computer or if we have to protect a company with 4 servers and 40 computers. If one of these points is not run the backups will fail.
- AnalysisDesignExecutionCheck
I am going to explain these 4 points trying to give as an example a hairdresser with 2 employees and at the end I will make a copy solution proposal for this type of business
1. Analysis
At this point you have to ask the following questions in order to make the following other points:
What is the most important information per order in your business?
In the case of a hairdressing salon the answers could be:
- The files of my clients with their information. Previous cuts, hair type, allergies, etc. The agenda The billing The blends of the dyes. FormulasThe stockAccounting
Where's the information?
Following the example of the hairdresser, the answers could be:
- The customer files and the agenda are in a program on a computer Invoicing is also in the same program The formulas for the dyes are in a notebook The stock is also in the computer Accounting is carried out by a consultancy
How often is your information noticeably updated?
That is, a bank for example updates the data every second and they need a constant backup system, a real-time duplication of data, but a hairdresser perhaps updates the data once every hour, every half hour. It depends on its size. The volume of data is small.
If you lost a file or data, how much would you need to go back in time, within the copy system, to recover it?
This point is a bit confusing, because two concepts are mixed. I will try to explain it as best I can:
Since you have to incorporate billing in the copy system, the current (Spanish) legislation requires businesses to save information up to 5 years ago. If we made the copy on a pendrive every day and deleted the copy of the previous day every day, we would always have the copy of the day before and if on the computer we have 5 years of billing, on the pendrive (copy) there would also be 5 years. Well, we would have figured it out.
But what if someone (some employee inadvertently, or a virus) deletes 2 years of old billing and we don't realize it for another week? On the pendrive would be the copy of the previous day but we would have the same as on the computer, only 3 years of billing. Here we would need to access the copies made a week ago, but since we have not included a conservation plan, we do not have these copies.
It is about establishing a Conservation Plan that allows us to store and access complete copies at least 120 days ago.
2. Design
We already have the information we need. Now we have to design the Backup System. Here we can do several things and it will depend on how protected we want to be and the information in the previous point.
As a general rule, we must implement a copy system physically within the company that performs daily backups and have a system that allows us to take backups outside the company. Also a protocol that checks this system at least every 15 days
Backups of the computing part are normally based on two components: the Software that makes the copies and the destination where they are kept.
The Copy Software is responsible for making a copy plan and executing the backups according to the schedule you want. There are free programs (FreeWare) type Cobian Backup that allow a certain degree of configuration and more complete programs like Symantec Backup Exec, which I like to recommend.
Until recently, copies were used as magnetic tapes of the DAT, DLT, or ULTRIUM type. The tapes allowed us to have a very long Conservation Plan for little cost. They also allowed having a copy (backup) outside the company every week in a simple way, taking the tape out every week.
Tape systems are currently being replaced by NAS, or network hard drives. They allow much faster copies and the cost is lower since the tapes do not have to be replaced every year.
The downside of the NAS is that it does not contemplate taking the copy out of the office. But this can be solved by putting another NAS in a remote office, or making copies in the Cloud.
3. Execution
We already have our copy system designed, now we have to mount it. The configuration of the copy system is as important as the rest of the points. A failure at this point and we can spend a year thinking that we have perfectly mounted copies and when recovering a file we find the problem that we cannot recover it because it was not included in the copies due to a bad configuration of the Copy Software.
We must ensure that all the Assets defined in the first point are included in the configuration and are being copied.
We must also make sure that we have a Conservation Plan in place so that we can go back in time to copy.
Another important aspect is the system update. Computer systems move, update almost daily, and copy software must too. It is important for a technician to check and update your copy system at least every 6 months.
4. Check
I've seen quite a few backup systems mounted by fellow professionals in serious companies failing on this last point. In the latter case, the person responsible for administration, who had the task of changing the magnetic tapes every day, had been two whole years since the system was assembled without failing a single day in this task. However, the copies had been out for over a year.
Why? Very simple, because the backups FAIL. And it is necessary to review and resolve the problems that occur to ensure its continuity.
A protocol should be established to verify the copies, review them to make sure they run on the defined schedules.
It is also important to check from time to time, perhaps every year, that the assets defined in the first point remain the same and if they have changed, they must also be changed in point 3, that is, in execution. I have also seen on many occasions how programmers move the database because they ran out of space and this new location has not been changed in the copying software, which stopped copying the database. The copy continues to run, technicians continue to check, but no one has noticed that the billing database has changed location and is no longer in the copy system.
As the last point of the check, it is important to perform a data recovery drill at least once a year as well. To make sure that the system meets what we need. This point can be complex depending on the computer system we have.
If you need help with backing up your business information, don't hesitate to contact me.
