If you've been using computers for a while, there has probably been at least one point in your life that you've lost data. Maybe it was something you were working on when your computer crashed, or maybe a disk failure wiped out some data. Does this bring back memories of frustration and angst?

It's very time consuming and expensive to replace lost data in a work environment. Even a small amount of data loss can mean huge problems for businesses. For example, sales leads, prospects, and client data are extremely difficult to replace. On average, it takes 19 days and costs $17,000 to retype 20 megabytes of sales data. With numbers like that, you're looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars per gig of lost data, not to mention the time it would take to manually restore it.

I recall a time when an employee of a company we support accidentally deleted an enormous amount a data in the middle of the business day.  The deletion occurred quickly and the data was gone in seconds.  The employee was understandably panicked and asked if there was anything we could do to help.  Fortunately we had recently upgraded their backup system and we were checking backups on a regular basis to ensure they worked properly.  We were able to restore all of the deleted data in about 20 minutes because the backup system was taking quick snapshots of the server during the day; we restored from a fresh backup made less than an hour prior to the accident.  The amount of lost data in this scenario would have been absolutely devastating to our business client.  Both the employee and I were extremely relieved that we were able to restore everything very quickly with very little effort.

Don't gamble your company data. It's the difference between running your business normally tomorrow or needing to scramble for the next several weeks without data, trying to recover and rebuild what you can. It's the difference between profit and loss. Business owners are aware of many aspects of their operation, but we often find that they are blissfully unaware of how vulnerable their entire business is to a catastrophic datat loss.  As a business owner , you do need to lose sleep over whether or not your data is backed up properly.

Fortunately, a data backup routine with the ability to restore data systems quickly, can be relatively easy to manage if planned properly.  It is very important to verify backup success on a daily basis and schedule at least a monthly test restore to verify the backups are not corrupted in some way. This work can be tedious and because of this, we often find businesses with worthless backups going back many months.   Give BrightWire Networks a call today at 360-528-6017 to discuss how to implement a disaster recovery solution.