Although the South African power crisis is being addressed, the local market can still expect the possibility of load shedding. These outages can result in damage to sensitive electronic equipment, such as hard disk drives and servers, causing data corruption and loss, posing serious problems, particularly in the Small to Medium Enterprise (SME) market.
Having an Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) installed is only part of the solution. Backups form the other part of a successful load shedding survival strategy. These five backup tips for SMEs will help smaller businesses protect themselves from data loss and the resulting consequences to the business.
1. Use built-in backup solutions
Many Operating Systems (OS) feature standard backup software as part of the package and these are affordable options. For example, Apple Time Machine is a standard backup solution on all Mac computers. Furthermore, purchasing an inexpensive external hard drive to perform backups to will also provide a level of protection.
2. Ensure rotational backup systems are in place
Due to the critical nature of business data and the consequences of losing valuable information, it is essential to ensure that you have more than one backup hard drive in place and that these drives are rotated regularly.
3. Keep your backup off-site (or in the cloud)
There is no point having three copies of your data if they are all stored in one place, as should the office be burgled, or be subject to fire, all copies of the data are likely to be lost. Another option is to use cloud-based backup solutions such as Dropbox which offer a limited amount of storage space, with additional space available for a nominal fee.
4. Ensure you can do a bare metal restore
Specifically in server environments, it is not only important files and folders that are stored, but also applications, settings and configurations specific to the OS environment. Should the server crash, getting back up and running quickly relies on the ability to do what is known as a ‘bare metal restore’. This allows you to restore an entire computer system with a server that is in the original state as at the last backup.
5. Test your backups
Even if backups are done regularly, not being able to restore the data defeats the object of backing up your systems and data. Schedule a routine recovery on the system to make sure that all data is being backed up. Restoration is often a complex process and it is recommended to use your IT partner to assist with advanced system recovery.
Following these five backup tips will ensure that, in the event of drive failure, data can be easily restored with minimal disruption to business.
Dawie Bloomberg is the managing director of Green Apple IT.
