January 2008 - Issue No. 10
Don't mistake those backups for archives
There is a significant difference between ‘backups’ and ‘archives’. Backups are copies of active data for short-term use and are frequently overwritten with updated versions; whereas, archives contain static data such as inactive document fields and old emails.
Statistics show that if a file hasn’t been accessed in 90 days, there’s a 90%+ probability that it will never be accessed again. In the meanwhile, it consumes valuable storage resources.
In a recent survey by Storage Magazine, users indicated the single biggest reason for backup failure was the quantity of data was too large to be backed up within the backup window.
It is critical for organizations (especially publicly traded companies) to ensure that data is retained and accessible when necessary, particularly from a legal discovery perspective. For example, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act imposes a seven-year retention period on certain financial records for public companies and their accounting and auditing teams. SEC 17a-4 of the Act requires financial services firms to retain email and instant messaging records for a minimum of six years.
As site-to-site backup systems use external USB hard drives, a business can easily and inexpensively build a library of hard drives to archive its data for up to seven years and beyond for regulatory compliance without a business incurring ongoing storage costs
Imagine having to operate your dental practice without
access to your critical Data!
Dr. Nathan Berg has a beautiful dental practice with all the latest dental equipment, comfortable chairs, soothing music in the background and spa like ambience aiming to provide the ultimate patient experience.
One morning disaster struck! Betty the receptionist arrived to work only to find their computer server had crashed. The technician who finally arrived several hours later discovered that the motherboard in the server had to be replaced, which in turn had corrupted the data on the Hard Disk Drive. This meant that a new one had to be ordered, which would take several days. In the mean time the practice had to be up and running as the week was fully booked with patients without access to their scheduler, patient records, accounting files, payroll and all their insurance billing information.
“No problem” said Betty, “We have been diligently backing up our data onto tapes and taking them home, so I am sure we can recover everything”. Unfortunately, when trying to recover the data from the tapes they found there was NO data whatsoever on the tapes. No one had ever tested that the data was being backed up successfully. To their horror the dental practice was in dire straits.
For the next few weeks they had no knowledge on which patient was going to show or what treatment had to be administered as the entire patient charts and records were lost. It took the dental practice 6 months of time and effort to re-enter all the patient records manually. Dr Berg estimated that he lost $40,000 worth of account receivable during that period plus the loss of goodwill, patient disruption and the inconvenience and cost of the staff working extra hours.
DataVault provides a unique affordable site-site data backup and recovery program that ensures your data is never lost, with the added advantage of immediate recovery.