How To Backup Data & Avoid Complete Failure

If you haven’t yet had the experience of a hard drive crash, consider yourself lucky. Many have had to call IT to diagnose whether their system experienced an Operating System failure, hard drive malfunction, or the dreaded hard drive crash. (Noooooooo!)

Let’s prepare for the worst and assume your hard drive will fail. (Because it will…it’s inevitable.)

When was the last time you checked your cloud / virtual server backup to make sure the job was completed successfully?

The truth is a  “cloud” backup may fail due to various reasons:

• Storage Space: not enough disk space to create a snapshot file for the backup.
• Software Bugs: software misses the backup schedule and stops running future backups.
• Incomplete Backups: the backup job gets stuck and the service needs to be restarted.
• Corrupt Data: unintended changes to the original data, such as disk corruption. (It happens!)
• Human Error: backing up the wrong data or drives, failure to backup desktops, etc.
• Password Changes: inability to access the backups because of a main admin password change.

If you don’t care about your data, get in your car, drive to a deep ravine, toss your hard drive over the side, and wave goodbye. All of your files are gone. Photos gone. Contact information is gone. That spreadsheet took hours to format and perfect the formulas….GONE. Ok, so you wouldn’t purposely destroy your data, so let’s take it a step further to protect your hard work.

Here’s what you can do to ensure your “cloud” backup is working correctly:

• Make sure the backup job includes the files you want to backup.
• Routinely perform test restores on random critical files.
• Perform at least one test restore once a month.
• If possible, configure the backup software to send out an email job status notification after the backup job is complete.
• Review your backup email notifications on a daily basis.

During scheduled server maintenance, Swift Engineers perform server backup checks and test restores as a part of routine managed IT services.

On several occasions, the team found backup jobs that were stuck, and the services required manual restarts. No notification email was sent and if maintenance were not performed the server would continue as if nothing was wrong

Most people think if they purchased a “cloud” backup software package and scheduled the backup job, they can just “set it and forget it”. Not true. The last thing you want is to find out that your backup is not working correctly when you need to restore critical files that were deleted or destroyed due to a hard drive failure.

For more information about IT services and cloud backup solutions, call 301.682.5100, 877.SWIFT.S.I (877.794.3874), or email Swift IT.

 

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