Computer Backup Plans

A Backup Article Contributed by Melissa Larose

Computer Backup Plans

Computer backup plans are an important part of a business process. The decision to create and implement a plan should come from upper management. The actual process of composing and writing the plan should be a group effort.

Computer Backup is Data

What is the value of your company's data? How and when is it created and what is its importance in your daily business? Do you know the answers to these questions? If not maybe you should. Improper computer backups that lead to loss of data and the inability to recover critical data after a disaster could lead to a failed business.

Knowing how to plan for a disaster and including a computer backup plan in your disaster recovery plan can save your business. Consider what might happen if you were to lose critical data. How long could your company survive without access to it? Are you able to re-create the critical data?

Can your system be reassembled and does your IT department know how to handle disaster situations? Are you training your IT staff on such topics? Are you asking these important questions during the hiring process?

Computer Backup and Storage

If you have created a computer backup plan and your IT department is following it routinely you may still have a problem with your data recovery. Have you tested your plan? Have you tested it in all the possible threat scenarios that your plan outlines? Simulating threats is great practice for any IT department. It not only gives them a feel for what might be necessary in order to handle a recovery but it also tells everyone where the points of failure are at.

Believe it or not that backup plan that you so routinely follow and the computer backup it generates can be one of those points of failure.

How can this be? You are backing up critical data and following the plan there can be no failure, right? Think again. If you have not tested the process of backup recovery then you don't know what will happen. Test it, test it again, and continue to test it. Systems and network configurations change and the process you follow today is not the process you may need to follow tomorrow. The last person to handle the routine and monitor it may have had some insight that the new person handling the backup plan does not.

Computer backup needs constant adjustment and review. Storing the backup on CD and dropping it in a file cabinet for possible future use may have worked before but your volume of data and the number of users you now have constitutes a new plan.

Computer Backup and Storage

Storing that valuable data may lead you on a merry chase of trying the latest storage media. If you are storing at high volumes you may have whole separate hard drive racks intended just for computer backup use. Don't forget to test your hard drives and the data on them. Hard drives fail.