In this business, you think a lot about backups. I try to tell people that “all of your data is at risk, all of the time”.  The reaction is usually the same; shock and disbelief. There seems to be sort of a “leap of faith” mentality when it comes to data protection. People don’t really understand what their data actually is.

Whether it is your vacation photos, or your valuable company data is essentially a bunch of 1’s and 0’s on some sort of media that can be made completely unreadable without much effort at all. The only reason that most people haven’t lost data is really just good fortune. Most people and many companies simply have a poorly planned data protection strategy. Many have no strategy at all.

The Data on your Network is Priceless

Your priceless pictures become microscopic magnetic particles on a thin film of a disk rotating at 10,000 rpm just below a stationary read/write located microns above. This is the same hard drive that has been spinning like this 24 hours per day for 3, 4 – maybe 5 years. Data is not permanent. That is why you can overwrite your Word file with a new copy. Poof! It’s gone.

Copying it to another form of media like an external HD, spreads your risk, but doesn’t eliminate it. Once you’ve thought through how to protect your data, you have to think about things like: what you are backing up (sometimes it’s not practical to backup everything), how many versions of a file you will keep, how long you will keep it and how you will keep track of what you’ve decided to do.

Then there is the whole question of checking that what you think is being backed up, is actually being backed up (Seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it?)

Managed Services Providers Think about Data all the Time

I really wish I didn’t think about backup so much, I really do. But as I think about how many hard drives we have spinning, tape drives whirring, and the terabytes of client data we manage on a daily basis, I’m really glad that I do.

This commentary was contributed by Axcell Technologies. They are a managed services provider in Chicago Metro.