Choosing A Backup Plan In Your Disaster Recovery Situation

Your livelihood may depend on your business and its success. Protect your business with a Disaster Recovery Solution. You may be thinking that a disaster could never happen to you or your business or that you would be fine if you lost your data, but the fact is disasters happen and the recovery process is slow and expensive. If you do not already know the value of a good disaster recovery solution, you will after you have experienced a crashed hard drive/Virus/Natural Disaster/Disgruntled Employee, etc...

There are many different solutions available however some of the solutions are better then others. When deciding on a disaster recovery solution you need to re-evaluate your business plan. Take into consideration what you would absolutely need in order to stay in business, then decide how important this information is to your business. Examples of the mission critical files you would need to backup would be your sales and marketing data, accounting data, engineering data, and your client database.

If you do not already know how costly a disaster could be to your business, you should know that even a mediocre disaster could put you out of business. The cost is far to great to ignore, According to the National Computer Security Association, it could take a month or more and several tens of thousand of dollars to replace all of your lost data. Having a backup plan in your disaster recovery solution is the best sense of insurance you could ever get for your business. Just to replace 20MB of your sales and marketing data it could take up to 20+ days and cost over $17,000. To replace 20MB of your accounting data would take about 21 days and almost $20,000. Lastly but not in the bit the least, to replace your engineering data you would be looking at 42+ days and roughly $100,000 for 20MB of data.

One way to backup your data, which I would not recommend, is via Cd's, Zip Drives, and Tape Backups. I can not stress enough how failure prone these methods of backing up can be. Cd's can be damaged in so many ways weather it be heat, scratches, cracks, or corrupted data. Zip Drives are very unreliable and have a low shelf life much like Cd's. However unreliable Tape Drives can be, they are still a popular way that Data Centers offer a backup solution for their clients. In order for tape drives to function when they are needed they need to be cleaned very carefully and often.

Many businesses back up their data to a Hard Drive. This method of backing up to a hard drive is the most popular and most reliable way to back up your mission critical files. Businesses that backup data to hard drives usually use two different options, Removable Hard Drives and/or Remote Backup Servers stored securely in a Data Center.

Backing up to a removable hard drive is a decent way to backup your businesses important data, however, these removable drives can be subject to harm as well. The issue with the removable hard drive would be the fact that you would be removing it from your computer and taking it home with you everyday. If you actually remember to bring it off site everyday, which you should, the hard drive is subject to being dropped, weather conditions, and theft.

Without a doubt, the most secure choice when deciding on a backup for your disaster recovery solution, is to backup your data to a remote location preferably to a secure Data Center. Companies like Cari.netoffer what is called a Remote Backup Dedicated Server. When you see all of the words like; Remote, Backup, and Dedicated Server, you know that you are backing up to a remote backup server that is dedicated to you and only you. No one else is sharing the hard drive space with you and your data is available to you any time that you wish, where ever you wish. Not only can a backup server be used as means to backup your files, it can also be used as a file server that you and your employees can access from anywhere they like. With Cari.net's Remote Backup Dedicated Server you can create directories, set permissions on who is able to access certain directories and from which IP address they would be able to connect from.

This diagram shows the many ways that you are able to access, backup and/or restore from your Remote Dedicated Backup Server. You may backup your computers from home, work, and even at remote locations where you would be able to connect to the Internet. For example, if you were working on a project from home/coffee shop/etc.. and you needed a certain file simply connect to your backup server and grab the file that you would need. This just goes to show that a Remote Backup Server that acts as a vital part in your disaster recovery solution, can be easily used as a file server as well.

Maybe you will choose to stay with your current solution and hope that nothing happens, however when you experience a disaster and loose your data you will then truly know how important it is to have the best backup solution available. Remember, for you and your business, the big difference between a complete disaster and a minor inconvenience is good disaster recovery plan. It's your data, Cari.net's Remote Dedicated Backup Server is your best solution