Backup Solutions
System backup solutions take many forms and come in many sizes. Over the past few years the “standard” backup solution has begun to change.
The “old” solution has been to use tape drives. Although extremely useful for offsite storage and archive, this solution (overall) is time consuming, unreliable, and expensive. Today’s backup solutions are provided through a combination of hard drive storage devices and remote storage facilities to protect against disaster and theft.
Traditional “old” tape backup solution issues:
Gartner Group study revealed that 70% of backups fail and are not realized until recovery is attempted.
Many backups are stored without encryption.
Offsite storage is a manual process and rarely performed.
No redundancy
High overhead
Why do companies need backup solutions?
Simple:
Data corruption WILL happen
Mistakes WILL happen
Hard drives WILL fail
Motherboards WILL fail
Many companies do not invest in a backup solution for two reasons. First, they believe the issues mentioned will never happen to them and second, backup systems are too expensive.
Has your company examined the cost of not using a reliable backup solution? Total cost includes downtime, labor to recreate any missing data, and time lost by those who needed the data to perform their jobs.
Examine a scenario where a company has only 5 PCs, 1 Windows 2003 file server and domain controller, and 5 users. The server’s main hard drive has crashed and is unrecoverable (this is a common issue).
If the server crashed and no full backup was available, let’s see what would need to be done to restore the system.
New hard drive procured and installed.
Hard dive needs to be formatted.
Operating system reinstalled
Computer accounts recreated
User accounts recreated
Security policies need to be recreated
Directory structure recreated
Local user profiles must be backed up (in order to save current user settings)
All client PCs must be removed from the old domain and joined to the new domain
Even with a simple 5 user setup shown here, the rebuild can take more than 16 hours to perform.
iValley has investigated different backup solutions to provide your company with options to keep your data safe, while keeping your bottom line in view.
