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The Importance of Backing Up
It is hard to overstate the important of backing up your business data. If it's ever happened to you, you will know just how stressful and costly it can be to lose data through hard disk failure, file corruption or just accidental deletion. These costs can include:
- Time and cost of recreating work
- Unique or creative work may never be able to be reproduced
- Time and cost of attempted data recovery
- Potential loss of clients if client data is lost
- Associated costs and penalties of some types of data loss (e.g. accounting or expenses data required by HMRC)
- Distraction and disruption to business
- Additional stress you could do without!
But despite its importance, many businesses back up only sporadically or not at all. And the reasons are entirely understandable. When you're running a small business and working under tight time pressures it can be hard to find the time to organise backups on a daily basis. So what is the answer to this dilemma? Get help from a specialist computer support services provider that can tailor a backup service to your requirements. Although this will involve some cost, it can be thought of as an insurance policy to be weighed against the costs and other potential damage to your business.
What Types of Backup Services Do We Provide?
Them Digital can provide you with three different types of backup service: magnetic tape, external hard disk and online backups. There are different benefits associated with each type so it is useful to understand what each one offers.
Magnetic Tape Backups
With this method, data is backed up to a magnetic tape, usually overnight. The tape drive resides on your premises and someone in your business is responsible for putting a new tape in the drive at the end of the day, and removing it in the morning. The backup process itself will be controlled by backup software, which runs on your servers and backs up your data via scripts in 'unattended' mode.
This method produces a library of tapes, which you keep, and which can then be accessed if a restore is required. Ideally, these tapes should be kept offsite, to protect them from fire or other damage. However, this can slow down the recovery process. If they are kept on site, investment in a fireproof safe is a good idea.
Backups to magnetic tape will typically be incremental (backing up any new or changed files), and scheduled daily, with a full backup taking place once a week (e.g. Friday).
An external magnetic tape drive unit costs around £1200 for a 400Gb uncompressed capacity (800Gb compressed), and tapes cost around £30 each. Apart from the upfront hardware costs, this is the cheapest backup method, since most of the work is carried out in house. The downside is that if someone forgets to replace the tapes according to the backup schedule the backup may not take place, or you may overwrite a backup, which might be needed in the future. Also, magnetic tapes can occasionally snap or become corrupted due to dirty write heads, so it is a good idea to regularly buy new tapes. Data recovery is relatively slow, due to the time it takes for the tape drive to restore data from tape. But in the event of disaster, most people will just be happy to have their data back, even if it takes a few hours / days to restore.
This method is best suited to businesses that:
- Prefer one-off hardware costs to ongoing monthly charges
- Have someone in the office on a regular basis who can manage the daily backup as part of their job (e.g. office manager or admin staff)
- Have a suitable location to store backups offsite (e.g. another site or employee home)
- Have quantities of data that will fit onto a magnetic tape
With this method, the role of Them Digital can source the required hardware and software and will be to help set up the tape drive and backup software initially. Assistance can also be given if data is required to be restored
External Hard Disk Backup
External hard disk back up is similar to that of magnetic tape backup except that the data is written to a standalone external hard disk, rather than tapes. As for magnetic backup, full backups will typically run once a week, with incremental backups taking place on other days. But there are significant advantages to using an external hard disk instead of magnetic tapes.
The first is capacity. Data storage can be measured in Terabytes if necessary and so is preferable if your business uses large data files such as images and video.
The second advantage is that tapes do not have to be changed daily, as drives have bigger capacities.
The third advantage is quicker and easier restoration. Due to the speed of the disk and the way the backup data is stored and accessed, this makes it quicker and easier to restore data.
As with magnetic tapes, it is a good idea to arrange offsite storage. A hard disk is easy to transport and can be taken home or can be couriered to a secure facility.
The cost of external hard disks depends on capacity and can typically range from £80 to £500. For full security you may require several hard disks so that one or more can be kept offsite while one is being used on a particular day. And, just like magnetic tapes, hard disks can occasionally fail, which adds to the need to rotate disk usage and replace at reasonable intervals.
This method is best suited to businesses that:
- Have large quantities of data to backup
- Need fast and easy access to backed up files
- Prefer one-off hardware costs to ongoing monthly charges
For additional Macintosh backups, there is Time Machine software, which allows a user to restore their machine to any chosen point in time. This software runs continuously in the background monitoring changes to files and recording incremental updates. This is even more powerful than daily backups since it can backup hourly. This is especially valuable for creative industries where significant amounts of high value work can be created within a single day and where even a day's lost work can be costly.
Online Backup Services
Online backup services work by transferring your data over the Internet to a remote server. The service will be configured to run at specified times, with a choice of full or incremental backups.
There are three major advantages of using an online backup service.
The first is that there is no hardware to buy or maintain. The second is that the backups take place automatically with no requirement to change tapes, drives etc This means minimal action needs to be taken by you, unless you want to access backed up data. The third is that data is stored securely offsite in the event of a disaster.
The cost for an online backup service is a monthly charge which is related to volume of data stored - usually charged per Gb. A free monthly trial is available in order for you to assess likely costs to your company.
An online backup service is heavily dependent on having a good Internet connection. Depending on what time of day the backup is done, it can cause a noticeable reduction in Internet speed for other users, especially if file sizes are very large. And if the Internet connection goes down for any reason, a backup or restore cannot take place. However it is possible to configure the service to use only a part of the available bandwidth. And in the case of Internet failure, we can help by restoring data to our offices and bringing the data to you.
Online backups are best suited to businesses that:
- Have medium to large quantities of data to backup
- Have a fast, reliable Internet connection
- Need fast and easy access to backed up files
- Want automated backups that don't depend on someone remembering to do it
- Prefer a monthly charge rather than one-off hardware costs
How Can Them Digital Help You Choose the Right Backup Service?
We can assess your data backup needs and advise you which type of backup method is going to be the best fit for your business taking into account factors such as quantity of data, how critical the data is, presence of staff in the office, quality of internet connection and how quickly you want to be able to restore data and/or access older versions of work.
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