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Make sure you are all backed up for Christmas
With so many businesses getting ready to close the lids of their laptops and reach for the mince pies it's important to make sure that you're backing up your data properly. It doesn't matter whether you are a sole trader or a network administrator, the last thing you want when you return to the office after Christmas is a bunch of corrupted files and a backup and restore process that has failed to deliver.
We are sure many of you will have a backup and restore routine and that is fine, in theory. But what the business IT support experts at Switch2IT would like to stress is the importance of making sure you have proof that your machine has done what it says so that you can go away with peace of mind wishing peace and goodwill to all men!
When backing up data, with all the policies, procedures and safeguards possible in place can you ever be 100% sure that your business data is secure? There are a number of things that can be done to make sure your data is as safe as possible and avoid the need for expensive and time-consuming data recovery operations, such as:
- Give your backup equipment a limited service life to mitigate unexpected equipment failure. Switch2IT technical support experts can help advise on, source and install small business or enterprise class products.
- Make redundant backups part of your back up routine; if one backup fails you will always have another to try.
- Try to keep your backups in physically different locations such as an off-site, highly-secure data centre used by Switch2IT as part of our backup strategy service http://www.switch2it.co.uk/services/service.php?id=8.
But what is the point of doing that if your backup fails to restore your important documents successfully? Depending on what systems or IT solutions you use, backups and routines can vary but here are a few suggestions of how you can check that your backup and restore process has worked this time:
- When you set up your backup make sure that the "verify backup on completion" option is selected. This is often a tick box.
- Once the job is completed try to restore a file at random, making sure that you restore the file to another location rather than the location where it was originally saved e.g. restore to your desktop if saved in your documents. The reason for this is so that you do not overwrite the current file.
- Attempt to open the restored file in the new location and check thoroughly to make sure everything is as it should be. If you are not the author perhaps you should liaise with the author to make sure there is nothing missing.
Should you have any questions or concerns about data backup and restoration for your business then please contact the IT support specialists at Switch2IT today. Give us a call for free on: 0800 0833416.