Disaster Recovery

So I’ve often remained wide awake at night running through the worst case scenario of what would happen if I lost all of my data. And when I say “Worse Case Scenario” I’m talking; house fire, Tsunami followed by Biblical Earthquake. Now I know this is a somewhat unlikely situation for a leafy town based in Mid Wales but “one, can never be too sure” and for this reason that’s why I have a simple, yet effective Disaster Recovery Plan in place.

Now, it’s very easy for me to sit on my mightier-than-thou-pedestal preaching about how easy it is to set up a Disaster Recovery plan and how cheap it can be but the matter of fact is, that it really can be easy to set up and it REALLY can be a lot cheaper than people think (Microsoft’s One Drive begins with 5GB of Free Cloud Storage)

Always remember, that if you use some form of IT to store data, where ether it bephotos of little “Charlie” riding his bike for the first time or you’re administrating an enterprise level network infrastructure, you will always be running the risk of IT failure – and this is where you’ll be thanking all of the gods that you have a Disaster Recovery Procedure in place, and more importantly How to use that recovery plan including frequent testing to ensure it works (there is not much point holding the passwords for your backup on the server you need to restore!)

There are many forms of disaster recovery that can be implemented, everything from a USB hard drive backing up data to a continuous incremental System State back up to a cloud storage. Here at 5C, we would always recommend a minimum 2 stage backup – 1 local storage e.g. a NAS located in a safe location and also a cloud based backup – this is in event of a
Disaster we can either restore from a local location or from the Cloud.  Why not check out Veeam Endpoint? - it’s a powerful yet simple solution for a full back up!

So, I’m not sure if it’s the smug satisfaction of being able to restore all of my files at the drop of a hat in the event of natural disaster or the fear of my wife hanging me upside down by my USB cable, but I will state for the record – get a Disaster Recovery procedure in place, you will need it.