On Friday a client had, what I thought was going to be a major backup catastrophe. A large group of files were accidently deleted. When we went to the backup tapes, we discovered that there were only 5 backup tapes, of which three were working and only one of the three tapes had the information we needed to restore and you guessed it, we could not get the information off the tape.
Fortunately after several attempts it did read the tape and we got the information back.
So this little episode focused our minds on our backup system. Tapes, while convienient, do not provide 100% secure backup and tape backup software can fail to run. What to do?
Well, we are going to test an online/offsite backup system. The backup company comes to our company and installs their backup software and takes a complete backup of our system. They install this backup on their servers. We then start up their back up software and over our broadband connection any changes in the files on our server are uploaded (not the whole server again) so it does not tie up our broadband connection and it can run at night.
This removes the need for tapes and other backup software. We can see our backup online and we don't have to worry about being able to restore from tapes if we need a file restored. It will also archive our files.
The data protection act applies to some of our data, so using a system in the USA, I have been told, does not conform with EU data protection acts.
Nilsson
http://www.nilssondenver.com
http://www.helpforbookeepers.com
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