Disaster recovery ‘It won’t happen to me’
Disaster recovery. Many small businesses suffer or fail due to a lack of even a basic back up plan. Disasters, whether they be natural or technical issues like the loss of their data due to hard drive failure, statistically you’re going to be affected at some point.
Ask yourself this:
How would you survive with the loss of your computer services and how long would it take you to recover?
We all suck at backup strategies and maintaining any form of a plan for the unexpected – will never happen to us right??
In my 25 years working in technical support and the IT arena I’ve seen, I recovered data but also had to report the permanent loss of critical business data.
It happens, all the time.
Personally, I run local and cloud-based backups via iDrive. They offer personal as well as full server recovery systems to get back online as soon as possible.
For a small annual fee, you can backup and restore your computer.
2Tb is around $53/year and they currently have sign-up deals and discounts.
Other backup strategies include using cloud storage like Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. As well as using local external drives and USB thumb drives.
Be it a hurricane, hard drive failure or malware infection that encrypts and locks you out of your files – be prepared.
No matter what you do, do something. Plan for disaster and for recovery your business really does depend on it as do your loved ones and cherished memories.
Have a plan and more importantly – TEST IT!
Some Disaster Recovery statistics
- In the past two years, Over 50 percent of businesses experienced an unforeseen interruption. The vast majority (81%) of these interruptions caused the business to be closed one or more days.
- 80 percent of businesses suffering a major disaster go out of business in three years, while 40 percent of businesses that experience a critical IT failure go out of business within one year. In the case of suffering a fire, 44 percent of enterprises fail to reopen and 33 percent of these failed to survive beyond 3 years.
- 60 to 70 percent of all problems that disrupt business are due to internal malfunctions of hardware or software, or human errors that may lead to fraud.
- According to Timesavers International studies, the catastrophe most businesses experience is not fire, flood or earthquake, but rather something much more insidious—malware. In 2008, the United States was the top country for overall malicious activity, making up 23 percent of the total.
- Companies that aren’t able to resume operations within ten days (of a disaster hit) are not likely to survive.
- Every week 140,000 hard drives crash in the United States.
- 31% of PC users have lost all of their files due to events beyond their control.
- 34% of companies fail to test their tape backups, and of those that do, 77% have found tape backup failures.
Using Hotmail, AOL and Gmail accounts communicates that you’re a single person with little time and attention to branding.
