Tag Archives: File Backup

4 Situations Where You Want a Robust Backup Recovery Plan

Backup Recovery Plan on a laptop screen in office

Disaster recovery plans cover you for disaster situations and also simple file recovery

Businesses often underestimate just how important a backup recovery plan really is. Backup recovery plans are put together as an afterthought, a ‘just in case’ like wearing your helmet to bicycle up and down your home street. But believe it or not, there are actually tons of different situations where a great backup plan is important, useful, or even necessary to keep your business on it’s feet. In fact, you’ll probably wind up using our backups more frequently than your top-of-the-line virus detection software.

Because like that bicycle helmet, a good recovery plan can be the difference between business life and death when a disaster finally does come along. And you’ll be glad you were prepared. Let’s take a quick look at four different business circumstances where a backup recovery plan is vital. Circumstances that are surprisingly common in the wide business world.

1) A Software Update Fails and Corrupts All Your Data

Most of our software today updates automatically. We have it set up (or it sets itself up) to periodically check for updates, download them, and sell-install them in the dead of night when no one is using your computer work resources. This happens all the time and is something we’ve come to rely on. But not all updates work correctly. A single piece of misaligned data that was damaged in the download can wreck the entire update.

And worse, updating currently active business software means that one corrupted auto-update can put your entire business worth of stored internal data at risk. An automatic update can fail and corrupt some or every scrap of data stored inside the original un-updated version. With a comprehensive backup recovery plan, however, you can easily restore all your data and software from the version before the update, then manually handle the update a second time to make sure nothing goes wrong.

2) An Employee Mistake Accidentally Deletes an Entire Database

Employee mistakes happen. And sometimes, they are enormous business-ruining mistakes no matter how genuinely sorry the employee is or how understandable the mistake might be. It is possible in some businesses for a mis-click or accidental keypress can delete reams of priceless business or customer data. Usually by clearing a database table or column without realizing that they have done so.

In this situation, you don’t want to have to lay the entire disaster at one employee’s feet. Instead, with a backup and recovery plan, it should be simple to rescue your company by restoring the lost data. From there, you can manage employee discipline with a calm and even approach that is appropriate to the mistake, not the potential averted consequences.

3) Your Entire Company Network is Ransomware’d

Then, of course, there’s the ransomware and other network-wide malware attacks that freeze you out of your own system. Because you can’t trust hackers to respond honorably to a pay-off, it’s important to assume that any computer compromised by ransomware or similar is probably ‘dead’. In other words, it needs to be wiped to factory settings to eradicate the malware and then restored to a functional business state through backup recovery.

If you have backups of your workstation setup and/or your entire network, this is the time to bust them out. Wipe everything that could be infected and rebuild our on-site computer system back from the ground up. The better your backups and implementation are, the more completely and quickly you can recover from a widespread malware attack.

4) A Flash-Flood Drowns Your Office, Including Local Archives

Natural disasters are another unexpected way that your data could be threatened. Even with all the cloud services, most businesses have at least a few locally stored physical archives on local servers, disks, or drives. Some businesses have their computer systems still almost entirely on-site. But this puts ‘all your eggs in one basket’ in terms of physical risk to your office building.

As the last few years have proven, you can’t do much to predict when extreme weather is about to ravage your part of the country. And if your office is hit with flash floods, earthquakes or something as simple as a neighborhood fire, all your local files and computers could be destroyed. But with a robust set of cloud-stored backups, you can not only recover those local archives. You may be able to rebuild from scratch using your backups of the previous network and work stations.

Having a well-built and comprehensive backup structure and recovery plan is vital to business continuity and disaster recovery.  For more information about building the best backup recovery plan for your business, contact us today!

Backup Disaster Recovery (BDR): Disasters Do Not Take Breaks During The Summer

Business man in summer heat on laptop wishing he had a Backup Disaster Recovery (BDR) plan

Planning ahead is key to minimizing the impact of data loss

Summer can bring a variety of things your way, including great weather, long days and nights, and the occasional sunburn. Those things should be at the top of our list of concerns during the summer, right? Unfortunately, there are many other things businesses have to be concerned about during the summer. There always seems to be a major difference between how we think things should be and how they actually are.

Business owners should always make it a priority to backup files so no information will be lost in case there is an unexpected event or emergency. If any information is lost during an event, the files can easily be recovered when you have your files backed up. Unfortunately, too many businesses fail to have a Backup Disaster Recovery(BDR) plan. The commitment to creating a Backup Disaster Recovery(BDR) plan seems to disappear during the summer. We encourage business owners to dedicate some time, energy, and effort into preserving all their data.

You Will Never Know When Disaster Will Strike

Many business owners fail to put as much energy into a BDR plan in the summer because they feel that they only have to worry about certain disasters during the winter or various areas of the year. While the winter does bring its own threats, summer can also have devastating impacts on businesses. Summer brings extreme heat, floods, hurricanes, etc.

Snowstorms can result in power outages, but floods, storms, and heat waves can also result in power outages. If your business is not ready for the impact of a power outage, you can find yourself in a situation that will not be easy to get out of.

It is important for business owners to remember that natural disasters, threats, and the risk of data loss can take place during every part of the year. Natural disasters can have a significant impact on your business, especially due to their ability to increase downtime due to data unavailability.

In addition to natural disasters, hackers do not take breaks during the summer. Businesses are the targets of half or more than half of attacks. As a business owner, you are not able to predict when a disaster will strike, but you will be able to control how your business will be able to make a recovery if a natural disaster or threat to data does strike.

Why Is A Backup Disaster Recovery Plan Important?

Your business’s BDR needs will not be the same as the business’s next door. A BDR will involve multiple processes that will include planning, testing, and monitoring the responses to various types of threats and failures. When you are thinking about taking a vacation to the beach, we encourage you to make some room to think about BDR. It may not be fun to think about now, but if you are ever hit by a disaster, you will be glad you took some time to create a BDR.

You do not want to be added to the list of businesses who lose nearly millions or over millions of dollars trying to recover from a loss of data. Many businesses also have to close their doors for good because they were never able to recover from the data loss. Constantly engage in BDR discussions and ensure that all information that is essential to your business can be recovered easily and quickly.

Disasters and threats can occur throughout the entire year, and it is important that you take the necessary precautions to ensure that losing data will not result in losing your entire business. Contact us today when you are ready to ensure your data will always be available.

Six Ways Backups and Data Recovery Can Save Your Business (Part 2)

Data recovery on keyboard

Your business deserves a life line

Welcome back to the second half of our two-part article on backups and data recovery as an incredibly versatile set of solutions. The beauty of building a layered and comprehensive set of backups with smooth recovery procedures is the ability to recover from almost any setback that even remotely relates to your files. Last time we talked about a few of the often unconsidered risks to your files like failed software updates, failed services, and employee mistakes. These less flashy but far more common risks can put any file system at risk if there’s no way to restore mistakes and failed processes. Backups allow you to restore files back to a previous whole and working state. Automated backups can also help you track down exactly when and why a file corrupted or was changed. Let’s pick up where we left off at how backups can be used to quickly recover from and completely shrug off ransomware attacks.

4. Ransomware Attacks
The current generation of hackers have a personal favorite form of attack that not only ruins your day but also has a chance of getting them paid. You’ve probably heard of ransomware in the recent news because it has been used to terrorize a large section of the computer-using population world-wide. While the exact programs evolve like the yearly flu, the method involves infecting your network, maliciously encrypting every file, then demanding ransom payment in crypto-currency. Rather than paying them or losing your files, you can simply wipe the network and implement your data recovery procedures from a recent complete backup. This method also works for almost any other kind of malicious virus, spyware, Trojan, or malware attack.

5. Programming Errors
When programmers and the IT department make mistakes, the consequences often have a much greater effect than the mistakes of a single employee on their personal system. In many cases, a change to the way the company network or proprietary programs work can cause an error left undetected for days or weeks at a time. Here is where having a collection of regular backups is incredibly helpful. No matter how far back the error was made, a good data recovery system can restore the system to its pristine state before the oversight, allowing your team to fix the problem without a massive loss of data.

6. Device Failure
No matter how convenient remote servers and huge hard drives are, there is one final fact about computing that many people forget. Computers are physical objects and data is stored on disks that can break, fry, melt, warp, scratch, or otherwise become unreadable and unusable. While there are extensive recovery procedures that can sometimes extract data from dead equipment, you can be back to work almost instantly by loading a recent backup onto a new machine and reinstalling it into the company network in the old computer’s place.
The data used, processed, and stored by your company is important for continued functioning and any loss of data can set you back by days, months, or even permanently depending on the value and replicability of the data. Fortunately, there’s no need to risk losing your valuable digital assets, because even software installations and settings configurations can be saved. With a complete data recovery plan, you can restore a single document from backup or reinstall an entire computer after a malware attack, and clone a computer with all its data for new team members. Cloud-hosted backups are an important part of a comprehensive business continuity plan as they can be used both for asynchronous disaster recovery and for hot-loading a second environment while the first is repaired.

For more information on backups and cybersecurity, contact us today!

Six Ways Backups and Data Recovery Can Save Your Business (Part 1)

Backups and Data Recovery concept on laptop with business man drinking coffee

Having a plan is crucial to business survival

Data loss in the business world is not something to take lightly. Whether you save things on the cloud, on local company servers, or in personal devices, data is everything to a modern business. Every company has an impressive number of files to defend ranging from your own financial records to the regulation-protected personal information of your clients. Working with computers makes this vital data easy to collect, store, manage, and analyze but it also makes it more accessible and easier to destroy than paper documents. Fortunately, you can make sure your data is safe from both mistakes and attacks the same way you would with paperwork: with backups. When considering your backup and data recovery plan, it may help to think about all the things you might have to recover from. Your business needs a comprehensive business continuity plan is ideal and cloud-hosted backups are an important part of any contingency plan because they can help your business recover and survive through different kinds of disaster.

1. Failed Software Updates

Most businesses use some combination of business management software through which they run almost all internal data. An ERP to manage your assets and inventory, a CRM to store and track all your client and sales data, and your finance department’s preference of economic software all hold vital proprietary and personal information that is necessary for the company to continue functioning. You rely on this software to store your data and make sure to update regularly. However, sometimes an update goes sideways, causing partial or complete corruption of the data stored by the program. Instead of trying desperately to piece together the garbled database entries, a backup can simply bring back the program and all its data to its pre-updated state.

2. Loss of Service

Does your business rely on B2B SaaS services? If so, consider how much are you trusting them to keep important company data safe. Even if they are entirely reliable and trustworthy business partners, it’s a risk to put the responsibility for your data security on anyone else because you never know when the other company might face some massive interruption of service or loss of the data they store. While their services may be incredibly valuable to you, make sure that any important data being stored by another company is also backed up somewhere safe that you have control over. This way, if you suddenly lose access to your B2B services, your company can access its data and serve its own needs until your business partner gets back on their feet.

3. Your Own Mistakes

No long-term computer user has gone through the years completely mistake-free. We’ve all typed something in incorrectly, mis-clicked a menu-button, and slipped up right before an auto-save. Many of us have accidentally hit ‘save’ at the wrong moment or inadvertently copy-pasted over something that does not have an ‘undo’ function. In that moment of panic as you realize that important data has been permanently altered in error, having a complete recent backup is a huge relief. With a comprehensive data recovery system, you can quickly access the file you accidentally altered and be back to work in minutes instead of scrambling for a way to revert your changes.

A good backup and recovery plan is an incredibly important aspect of modern business. Everything from minor employee mistakes to hacker-inflicted destruction can be quickly and smoothly recovered from with the right layered backups and practiced recovery plans. Of course, this is only the first half of our two-part article. Join us for part two next time and we’ll talk about how backups can also help you in the face of ransomware, bugs, and device failures! For more information about how to build the right backups infrastructure for your business, contact us today!