Disaster Recovery Planning
Disaster Recovery Planning
Disaster Recovery Planning
For most small to medium sized businesses, the stresses of accomplishing everyday work, and generating the needed revenue can cause thoughts to stray from "what if" sorts of situations when it comes to their computer infrastructure. While some of this is to be expected, a big "what if" that needs to be considered is "what if my system fails"? Many small businesses do not realize how much could be lost in the event of a system failure or disaster, and many small businesses will actually not survive a major IT catastrophe. A proper disaster recovery plan, can be the difference between an inconvenience that will more than likely be covered by insurance, and a completely crippling disaster.
Many small businesses keep a small office server, or series of computers. These computers usually contain all of the accounting information, and most of the customer information for the company. Some of the information can be highly sensitive, and for slightly more elaborate operations, everything from inventory values, to a full blown online store, or large database of leads, copyrighted content, payroll records, etc. A business owner should take a little while every now and then to contemplate exactly how much of the value of a company is stored on the computers. And the bad news... Insurance companies generally do not cover the data stored on computers, only the computers themselves.
Backup - Backup is the most important area of disaster recovery planning. A good backup procedure can make most disaster recovery operations very easy, and far less time consuming. Following some simple guidelines can make your backups very secure.
1) RAID is not a backup - If your server has mirrored drives in it, this is in some ways better than nothing, because it does protect well against hardware failure. However, it does not protect against user errors and accidental deletion, file corruption, virus attacks, etc. Any damage to one hard drive is immediately copied to the other. I wish I could dig up the name of the site, but about a year back, I saw a fairly major blog type website go down permanently because they were relying on mirrored RAID drives for backup, and both drives were deleted. Another good miscellaneous RAID tip is: Don't use RAID 0 unless you really need the space or speed.
2) Backup every day - Leave computers with vital data on them on, and set backups to run every night. With many systems, it is possible to set them to back up to the server, and have the server back up all of the systems vicariously when it does its routine shortly afterward.
3) Never Backup to the same disk your system is running on - It can be tempting to save on hardware costs, and simply backup to a secondary partition, but while this can help against corruption and software issues in many cases, it does nothing to protect from physical failure.
4) Keep 2 backup drives or devices as a BARE minimum - What if the disaster that you need to recover from is more than a disk failure. If the disaster is a fire, flood, burglary, structural collapse, or anything of the sort, it is vital to have a backup kept off site. Multiple backup drives should be used, and it should be rotated so that all of the backups are never in the same place at the same time. Use a network storage device apart from your existing setup as well to ensure that you can keep a backup if something happens to one part of your office in specific. Many companies now offer remote backup over the internet, and some of these can be very reliable if you are willing to pay the monthly expense to keep it running. Be sure to ask the provider about the nature of their data center, though... If they are operating only one data center, it will have all of the same venerability. Redundancy is a very good thing, and while it can be overdone, it is a bit difficult to have too much security.
5) Check your automated backups often - Make sure they are running properly, and not reporting errors.
Encryption - Many businesses have computer systems that contain data that is highly sensitive. This could be the accounting records of the business itself, or personal customer information. All drives containing sensitive information should be encrypted, so that they are useless if removed from your system. With proper encryption, you may still have to worry about the loss of the drive, but you will not have to worry about your data being compromised.
Do not store your passwords, server setup information, and other things, on the computer that requires it. Keep paper copies of all of this information in a secure location somewhere.
Know how quickly you need to be back up and running in the event of a disaster, and keep that in mind when procuring equipment. If you cannot afford a few days of unreliable computer service, you should keep redundant equipment for your vital processes somewhere else, so that it can be switched quickly and efficiently. You may find yourself paying far more than you have to if you buy new equipment in a pinch.
No plan for disaster recovery is 100% foolproof, but with a few simple steps, the odds of major data loss can be reduced very dramatically.
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