Backups are essential!

What should be backed up?

Accounts - Your businesses books are critical, if they should vanish your business may not survive. A robust backup system for accounts programs such as Pastel or Quickbooks is a must. 'Robust' refers not only to the physical medium of backup but also to the policy the people involved must follow to ensure quick recovery in the event of a disaster.

Email and contacts - Email has become a widely used business tool and your emails are a record of many of your business transactions. If you use your computers address book to store contacts that is also an important resource you will want to protect.

Photos, music, movies - As cameras have become digital so the storage of photographs has moved from paper to digital. Many people collect thousands of pictures only to have an unexpected computer crash destroy some or all of them. Music and movie collections are exposed to the same risks. The ONLY way to ensure your data is safe is to have multiple copies of it, preferably in physically separate locations.

Documents - The documents stored on your computer may well be of major importance to you as well as a great deal of work to recreate.

What solution do you offer?

For on site backup we install a Network Accessible Storage (NAS) drive on your premises and set up your computers to maintain synchronised folders of your important data on that drive. This provides a first level of protection.

For your critical data, we help you to initiate a policy of rotating off site backups done on a daily basis. This second level of protection is mainly for the stuff that would put you out of business if you lost it, such as accounts data. These backups require a staff member that is responsible for them. This staff member has to rotate the media through a period of a week, taking the backed up data off site and bringing the next days backup media in to be written to. This staff member also has the responsibility of confirming that the backups are running as intended.

A third level of protection can be implemented via the Internet. there are a number of off site backup solutions that allow you to back your data up over the Internet to a location elsewhere. Again, if this is implemented someone has to take responsibility for checking that the backups are working as intended.

We provide training in the use of these backup technologies and techniques as well as setting up the initial hardware and software requirements.

Don't get caught flatfooted. We help you to get your backups sorted out!