Disaster Recovery Planning for Small Businesses

Proactively planning how to recover in the event of a disaster could save you thousands of pounds in lost business and disruption and would definitely prevent a dented reputation.

It is surprising to see the number of businesses who have never tested their backup plan to ensure that they can easily recover from loss of data or a complete disaster.

Here are a few of the things you should be aware of or consider:

If you are using a tape drive to backup data and your server (including tape drive) is destroyed, how long will it take you to get another tape drive and where would you get it from? As you would need to get a replacement tape drive before you can even start to restore your data.

If you are doing a standard backup using Windows Backup, Arcserve, Backup Exec, Tapeware etc and you need to recover to different hardware. It is likely not to be possible at all!

If you use a USB Hard Drive for backup then you can restore data to any machine which you can connect a USB drive to (pretty much anything) and you can start doing this straight away.

If you use imaging software such as Acronis True Image then you can restore your entire system to different hardware very quickly (usually within 4 hours)

We have already put together written and tested IT disaster recovery plans for many companies in the Nottingham & Derby area. Not only has it saved a few of our clients from major disruption in problematic events, but has also helped to streamline their IT procedures and make server migration far easier and more cost effective.