“Lost Data Should Be a Thing of the Past”

Data is the lifeblood of all businesses today, without it businesses cannot function. The moment you find yourself sitting at a search box typing in, “hard drive recovery” is the day you realize that you really didn’t have a good data RECOVERY plan. Let’s talk about a couple easy steps to make sure it never comes to this!

Number #1 — Know where your data is!
It’s surprising the number of businesses that are storing very important data in places they do not even back up. Example: The sales team started using a random folder on the server that was really meant to hold weekly reports that aren’t needed past that week, thus it’s not backed up. Just because it’s on a “server” doesn’t mean it’s being backed up! (yes, I know that most of today’s backups are image-based and cover the entire server, but this is not always the case.)

Number #2 — Only store data on laptops (or desktops) using a cloud-based file sharing solution. The two that come to mind are OneDrive and Dropbox. Set these up, let them create their default folders and MOVE all your important data into them. Once you have this setup it’s very easy to create new data and know that it’s syncing to the cloud. Create a shortcut on your DESKTOP to this folder so every time you are tempted to save a document there you can easily click the shortcut and have it go to the right place!

Number #3 — Trust but verify. Rather than wait to see if your IT group can recover a file when you need it, maybe just ask for one as a test. Your IT group *should* be running monthly random recovery tests for this purpose, but this is not typically happening correctly. Don’t do this weekly but a semi-annual request should be sufficient to ensure the processes and controls are in place to get your data back if you need it.

Number #4 — Understand how far your backups go. Often the backups are working well, and the issue really is that we needed ARCHIVING! For recovery purposes, we really only need about 3 weeks worth of backups, past that it should be part of an archiving processes. If you know you need to keep file versions or historical copies there are some great solutions for that, one could be as simple as versioning in SharePoint document libraries.

Written by: Edward Stringfellow