Network Disaster Recovery a Must

While most business are doing some form of disaster recovery, most of the time it is in the form of data backup. That means all those Word documents, PDF's, spreadsheets and images are being copied and moved off your network hard drive someplace else, usually every night.

 

Maybe the external hard drive that saves these copies is sitting next to the server in your IT closet. Maybe the server is zipping the data file up and sending to an offsite server in a data center somewhere. Maybe the data is being saved locally and offsite. All good solutions - for DATA. But ask yourself, how much time have you spent over the past year adding fields, changing fonts and colors or creating macros in those spreadsheets?

 

All those changes to your programs will be lost if your network server is damaged or destroyed by a fire, weather incident of equipment failure if you don't back them up as well. It's called an image. A good disaster recovery will take an image of the programs on your server a few times a day (or as often as it's programmed to) and store the image on an external hard drive or server. Images are usually stored locally (in house) because they are HUGE and take a long time to restore - days if offsite and coming through the Internet pipe

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So, in closing, make sure you're disaster recovery plan includes a real path to surviving a disaster, not a phony one your IT provider sold you. What good will it do you to have your data and have to populate new versions of your programs that need to be configured all over again.