Online Backup and Recovery
A Backup Article Contributed by Melissa Larose
Online Backup and Recovery
Online backup may be the way to go when it comes to your data recovery plan, but what about the recovery part of the plan? Have you tried to recover the data from an online backup service? How do you know if it works as easily as they say? Here are some ideas about online backup service recovery you might want to consider.
Online Backup is Untraditional
It's a fairly new technique, online backup. It makes sense doesn't it to have your data streamed over to another location, out of harms way. Online backup is certainly easier than a manual backup. Remember those? Especially when you are dealing with terabytes of information, online backup just can't get any better.
But the untraditional can sometimes bring risks. In your zeal to try the latest process or gadget or to get some crazy, chaotic project off your desk, you may attempt a process that you haven't obtained all the details on. It happens to many IT workers. The wish factor and the speed of technology seem to blend somewhere along the way you forget that the product or process may not accomplish all you believe it might.
Online Backup Needs to Be Tested
The best policy to follow when purchasing any type of new technology is test it, test it again, test it a third time. Most legitimate vendors will always allow a company a trial testing period. There is liability involved for their company and they want you to feel completely comfortable with your purchase. They want you to come back and spend more money with them, of course, and become a life long consumer of their products.
Take the vendor's online backup product that you are interested in and run it through your disaster recovery plan. Check the online backup and particularly the recovery capability in every scenario you can reproduce. Don't do this, of course, with your original data. Setup a test environment and mimic your system as best you can. Test it against an electrical outage recovery, a hard drive crash recovery, a simple deleted file recovery, and even a full system recovery.
Live with the product for a week or maybe your company's full business cycle. Online backup should be fully tested before bringing it into your enterprise on a full time basis. No one on your end of the deal should ever be in doubt as to whether or not the system can be recovered. Test it.
Online Backup Requires Guarantees
When finalizing your online backup contract make sure you have obtained a guarantee of availability from your service company. It is your data, after all, and your IT department should have full access to all of your data day and night.
Look also for a fully managed service. You want access to your data but you also want to know that you have a human voice to speak to in case you need it. Many services don't bother with a 24/7 staff. They have personnel that may be tied to a cell phone or a pager but are not actually in the service center. You want reassurances that your data is protected all of the time.
