Get rid of the Tape Drive – Faulty tapes are the number 1 cause of “failure to launch”

It has been proven that over 40% of all tape drives are used far beyond their expected life usage. For example one of our clients was diligently backing up daily with a 2 week rotation and keeping one week off-site, great you say, well when we tested the tapes we found that 5 of the 10 were useless. Luckily they did not need the tapes in a jam.

Get rid of the people – we all know that we should have taken the backups last Friday, or was it Judy’s turn.

Backups should be automated, should work even if the secretary is off sick, and they should tell you if there is a problem, it’s the 21 century after all.

Check your data regularly – it doesn’t help backing up if you data is never tested, TEST TEST TEST regularly. 

The cardinal sin is to assume that now that you have you fancy automated backup system that that is the end of your responsibilities, well you need to check you data regularly, how regularly, well as often as you can. Import you database back into your application, see if you can do a trial balance on you accounting software, make sure that big proposal you where working on still opens.

Remember the 3 – 2 – 1 Rule – 3 Copies of your Data, on 2 different types of media, and 1 copy stored offsite

3 Copies of your Data – 1 on the Hard Drive – 1 on another device and at least 1 in the cloud

2 Different media – Hard drives & The Cloud – match made in heaven

1 Offsite Business Cloud Storage, none of this Dropbox nonsense