Disaster Recovery: A Triumph of Hope Over Experience
December 13 2006
by Jake Liddell
The report highlights that 28% of businesses surveyed had no disaster recovery plan, and yet just 6% of them felt that they weren’t well positioned to recover from a disaster. This startling figure prompted Professor Jim Norton to state that this was a “triumph of hope over experience”.
The smaller they get, the worse it gets. Companies with 25 or less employees were worst at safeguarding their data. 20% of them are backing up their data less than once a week. For a company of 25 people, that’s a potential 125 person-dys of effort that could go down the drain with a single power spike or hard disk failure.
FourHats, as a small business itself, knows the effort that some of this can take to get right. Even writing the plan can be a major undertaking, and to make proper provisions might well be several weeks’ work. My view is that automation is the key. All our work system backups are totally automated, with the results being collated and automatically sent to me via e-mail. I can immediately see when we’ve got an issue.
In running a business, demands on my time are many, and this automation allows me to concentrate on other things, knowing we’re prepared for the worst. And I know from bitter experience that these disasters do strike - Only this weekend I lost 2 days of time when something knocked out both of a twin set of RAID disks, and an attached backup drive on a personal machine. Lesson learnt: Multiple backups, automated, multiple places - Disks are cheap these days - with those 125 days of effort that a typical small business might lose, you could buy eight hundred or so 250Gb disks! That’s enough to retain backups of 500Gb of data every day for a year! We really have no excuse.