This week I am going to pick a topic each day that is affecting small to media sized businesses.

Then I am going to tell you how I solve the problem.

Today’s topic is the big one BACK Up’s

My clients all use servers, these all have either DDS tape backup systems or NAS (Network Attached Storage) for backing up their data.

A Backup is only going to be any use to you IF it works.

I have been working in technology management for 13 years. Trust me the back up you think is working from time to time won’t be.

Examples of Failure

DDS tapes are only good for 150 uses, so wear out eventually. If your tapes are 5 years old do they still work?

There are some file names and paths that can cause a back up to fail and stop the back up job for example files or folders with names greater than 256 characters.

People from time to time forget to backup.

People backup a two tape backup on the same single tape (yes you did read that correctly).

Automated backups can and do fail but because they are automated you assume they work everyday, they don’t.

I could go on….

So how do I help my clients with this problem? Easy, I do it for them.

Every evening I remotely access the customer’s site and perform the backup myself. This is a 5 step process

1) Connect to the remote customer’s site.
2) Start the backup.
3) Disconnect.

Wait for the backup to complete

4) Re-Connect to the remote customer’s site.
5) Check the back completed successfully.

This is great for my clients it’s now just something they don’t have to worry about.

There are a few downsides.

I have to work out of office hours and clients are working later and later, realistically it’s about 7pm before they are all out of the system.

So a little inconvenient for me, but Its one of the most important and valuable services I provide to my clients.

If you have questions about this or other technology issues then please leave a comment or e-mail me.

Link: http://www.481.co.uk

This entry was posted on Monday, November 27th, 2006 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Blog Entries, Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.