Disaster does strike

Although you plan to avoid disasters they will always happen, usually from a combination of circumstances that you have not anticipated or thought extremely unlikely.  What is more there may be some additional twist that will make sure recovery is not straight forward.

A week ago one of our customers lost several key servers that needed to be restored so that the business could get back to normal operation.  I am pleased to report that ShadowProtect from StorageCraft did the job and we were able to bring the servers back on different hardware, but it was not an easy ride and the experience reinforced several points.

1 Test your disaster recovery process so that you know

• How long it will take
• The equipment you will need
• There will be no critical decisions to make
• You can be confident because you have done it at least once

2 Restoring large quantities of data can take a long time.  Business data is continually growing; do you really need to restore 1.5TB of data for the system to work? Will it be 3TB next year?

3 If you lose your servers you will need alternatives to restore to. In this case there was almost sufficient capacity available; only one new server had to be provided.

4 There is nothing worse than going through an 18 hour restore process for it to fail because of some equipment incompatibility and you have to start again.  On this occasion we hit a 2TB to 3TB disk compatibility issue; we had to do some fast thinking and start again.

5 The benefit of practice and following a documented process cannot be underestimated when the pressure is on and people want to know when they can get back to work.

Everyone will agree that practising the DR process is a good idea, but they do not always want to pay or make time for it.  If you are responsible for this do not be put off, you need to do everything you can to reduce stress and ensure success in the event of disaster.

There are many things that I will look at in more detail over the coming weeks.

Promoting backup to reduce business risk

We are enthusiastic about helping people to use IT, but backup and disaster recovery is not a subject that generates enthusiasm in many people.  Emma, from Links4Dorset, is helping us to build our ProvenBackup website to promote server backup and eliminate the business risk of lost information; with particular regard to our experience in using ShadowProtect from StorageCraft. 

One of the earliest pieces of work Emma did for us was to question a few companies about backup. The conclusion was not surprising, “small business do understand the need and importance of backup, most do not ensure that adequate backup and disaster recovery is in place”. 

With this in mind we are setting out to help people understand the need for secure backup and disaster recovery, if only to help them use what they already have more effectively.

Proven Products to help business

We have been working with small businesses for over 10 years.  During this time we have invested many hours on different products and systems and we would like to share our experience on the ones we have found most useful.  We are going to label these solutions as "Proven" and develop a series of small websites to promote them.

We are currently using ShadowProtect from StorageCraft to provide backup solutions to our customers and we plan to develop this area of our IT business over the coming weeks and months.  www.provenbackup.co.uk