Backups & Disaster Recovery

Overhaul

We can have a look at your company's backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity plans. Additionally, we can investigate:

  • The data being backed up
  • The type and age of media
  • The frequency of backups
  • Offsite storage
  • Software options
  • Audit company data and backups to see what is, and is not, backed up

Backup Validation

We can check that data has been backed up, and that no errors have occurred. This process should be partially automatic and performed at every backup. It is surprising to find that most businesses don't have a regular check, and even more surprising, they rarely check the logs until there is a problem and there is nothing left to restore.

Data Validation

We can check that the backups have occurred, including a test restore that tests the disaster recovery plan. This should be performed at least once a year depending on the sensitivity of the data to the company. Again, most companies never attempt to restore their data until it's too late. It is as vital as backing up the data in the first place, especially if your disaster recovery plan is to restore the data elsewhere only to find out too late that the restore is incompatible with the hardware you are trying to put it on.

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning

We can help you develop a plan tailored to your business to cover emergency scenarios. Part of this planning is for the company to decide what to recover from and how much they want to spend. Everything is redundant given enough money. A good disaster recovery plan should cope with having to relocate at short notice and restore data to alternative hardware. Whereas a good business continuity plan should evaluate and triangulate essential data and software to allow any single piece of hardware to fail and to cause minimal disruption to the business. Above all, it is not a good plan to rely on a single piece of hardware as they all fail sooner or later.