All responsible businesses today protect themselves from financial disasters via insurance policies structured to recoup loss of revenue should the unexpected occur. But an insurance policy can’t restore lost customer and other business data, and that’s often the most expensive loss of all.
A couple of years ago, when a business acquaintance first told me about his company’s decision to switch from media-based data storage (tapes, CDs, zip drives) to utilizing the services of an online data backup company, the first thing that came to mind was a nightmare that had occurred in my business back in the mid- to late 80s. “Disaster” was definitely the word for it – and our protection against the fallout from it was practically non-existent.
Sometime after the end of business on a Friday, some pipes burst in the suite of offices right above ours. Throughout the weekend, untold gallons of water crashed through the ceiling unrestrained and uncontrolled, so that by Monday morning it looked as if a tidal wave had washed us. Unexpected, to say the least, on the 14th floor of a building in the middle of town.
As is the case with most executives it was my habit to be the early bird to the office, and the sight that greeted me when I unlocked the door is forever burned into my brain. Our carpet was soaked through with three to four inches of water. Our furniture was all but floating through our suites – and even the pieces that remained stationary were soaked through and ruined. All the phone lines were shorted out. And I didn’t dare flip any light switches….
Worst of all, though, was what I saw when I went to inspect our small, fledgling IT area. Absolutely everything in the room was thoroughly drenched and dripping water, from our server to the file cabinets housing tape backups to the PCs on the desks. We had, just several months prior, begun the arduous task of moving our client and other business data from hard copies onto an electronic storage system – and I can still hear the one word that echoed in my head as I surveyed the damage: Gone.
Our insurance policy covered the financial losses – but nothing could reimburse us for or replace the staggering amount of vital data lost to the flood. Because this was in the 80s and IT departments were just beginning to be considered in small businesses, the learning curve was steep and expensive when anything out of the ordinary happened. Online data storage services didn’t even exist in those days. Our entire repository of crucial data had been on those tapes and on that server – and we lost almost all of it.
The first lesson my company learned from our flood was that we needed physical, off-site storage for our organizational and customer data. That’s how we handled backup and storage for many years following that event – but while that was a great deal safer than storing our data on-site, there was nothing to guarantee our storage site wouldn’t ever experience such an unexpected disaster, as well.
I never once fully stopped worrying about it – until I learned about online data storage and backup services. Today, my company utilizes both an on-site tape backup and the services of a remote, online backup system. Our in-house tapes are mostly used for monthly backups (thus saving wear and tear on the tapes and maintenance on the hardware) and we use an online data and storage service for daily data backups. We’re fully covered, now – and our data is as safe as it possibly can be.
Monday, September 3, 2007
Blog Archive
Categories
- 4 Things You Should Know About Hard Drive Crashes (1)
- A Complete Data Recovery Solution (1)
- back up for laptops (1)
- Backing Up Data on CD's and DVD's (1)
- Backing Up Your Data Frequently Can Save You Money (1)
- Bare Metal Server (1)
- Can I Recover Deleted Files? How to Retrieve Deleted Files (1)
- Consumers and Communications (1)
- Data Recovery (3)
- Data Recovery Freeware - Take Advantage of the Freeware Available to You (1)
- Data Recovery Help (1)
- Data Recovery Situations (1)
- Data Recovery Software (1)
- DBX File Corruption (1)
- Defragmenting Your Hard Drives (1)
- Diagnostic Tips For Hard Drive Data Recovery (1)
- Do You Back Up Your Website (1)
- Do You Know Where Your Data Is (1)
- Ease the Headache of Saving Files (1)
- File Recovery - 3 Ways I Prevent Hard Drive Crashes (1)
- Formatted Data Recovery (1)
- Fully Utilize the Full Benefit of a SAN With Automatic Defragmentation (1)
- Hard Disk Data Recovery - How to Restore Deleted Data (1)
- How to avoid data loss and data recovery (1)
- How to Backup Your Computer Hard Drive (1)
- How to Create an Offsite Data Backup and Restore Plan (1)
- How to Recover Lost Data From a Flash Drive (1)
- How to Recover Photos Deleted From SD Disk Or XD Card (1)
- How to Retrieve Deleted Data From Your Computer (1)
- How to Retrieve Deleted Files From Your Computer (1)
- Identity Theft by Selling a Used Computer (1)
- iPhone Data Recovery Advice (1)
- IT Disaster Recovery - A Finance Perspective (1)
- Laptop Backup Software Program (1)
- need laptop back up software (1)
- Online Backup and the Consequences of Data Loss For Business (1)
- Outlook Express Recovery (1)
- password finders (1)
- PDF Password Finder Tips (1)
- RAID Arrays (1)
- RAID Data Recovery (1)
- Recover Deleted Files - Vista (1)
- Recover Hard Disk Files - How to Recover Deleted Files (1)
- remove a password (1)
- Remove a Password From Your PDF Files (1)
- Restore Deleted Data (1)
- Restore Deleted Files - Vista (1)
- Retrieving Deleted Files From Your Computer (1)
- SQL Data Recovery (1)
- SQL Server Snapshot (1)
- SQL Servers (1)
- The Role of This Software Tool (1)
- Understanding Data Loss and Data Recovery (1)
- website back ups (1)
- What to Do When Everything is Lost (1)
- Why to Buy Online Data Back Up Services (1)
- Will Data Recovery Work (1)