Free Computer Consultant's Tip-Of-The-Week e-Zine for October 19, 2007
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I attended a disaster recovery seminar this week with about 100 small
business consultants similar to myself. During a presentation by a
vendor, a slide was shown citing a Gartner Group statistic stating
that 70% of data restorations fail for one reason or another.
I think most in the room were willing to agree with that statistic,
although one vocal individual was not. What he was not opening his
mind to was that his personal experience with backup and restore is
those in which he has had control and direction; i.e., the backup was
done correctly in the first place.
My experience is similar (100% success) - for those restorations
where I had significant control of the backups.
The key to the above cited statistic is that most backups are not done
under the direct or even indirect oversight of a trained IT
professional. The majority of backups are done by either John Q. User
at his home or small office, or by an inadequately trained low level
staff member at a larger business. (Essentially any business without
full time, competent, IT staff.)
Let me cite just one example from my professional experience.
This small company made quite a bit of money. The accoutant for the
firm kept a variety of financial data on a workstation; the company
had no centralized server. The PC was "protected" by a Travan tape
backup device.
For whatever reason, data was lost. I was hired to restore the data.
Someone else had setup the automatic backup and the accountant was
instructed to change tapes daily. So for about 2 years she had been
using the same set of 5 tapes labeled Mon - Fri. Never cleaned the
drive, never bought new tapes, never made any verification whatsoever
to determine if daily backups were successful.
I went to do the restore. (I cleaned the drive first.) I asked for the
most recent tape backup, yesterday's. I put the tape in the drive and
the drive never quit trying to retension the tape - for about 20
minutes (tape is getting hot at this point). That ain't gonna work.
Next tape. After a few minutes the software reported "no data".
Next tape. It had been run off the end of the spool and no one noticed.
I put it back on just to see how old the data was - it was old.
Next tape. Retensioned for over 20 minutes, until it was so how it
about melted and I took it out. Ain't gonna work either.
Last tape. It worked. It was about 4 days old, but it was what we had.
So that's at least an 80% failure rate there. I believe the Gartner
Group's statistic.
My advice? Don't be part of the wrong end of that statistic. If you
don't know how to backup, find out.
You can start here:
http://www.FreeComputerConsultant.com/computer-backup.html
P.S. - Thanks to all who bought my new eBook. If you haven't checked
it out yet, please do.
http://www.freecomputerconsultant.com/email-etiquette-how-to-improve-your-email-image-ebook.html
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When was the last time you backed up YOUR PC?
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http://www.FreeComputerConsultant.com
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