August 2008 - Issue No. 16
Did you backup last night?
Last May 2008 the White House admitted, among other things, that it has no backup tapes for White House emails for the period March 1, 2003 through May 22, 2003. A period which covered the launch of the Iraq War.
Last year three businesses relying on QuickBooks Pro for Macintosh filed a class action lawsuit against the product’s manufacturer Intuit for sending faulty software code on the weekend of Dec. 15-16, causing the wholesale deletion of their QuickBooks data and other files.
While the White House can get around losing important information, you or your company may not be that lucky. Every year, businesses are increasingly moving away from paper record-keeping to electronic information management systems. Losing data can have dire consequences including possible fines and bankruptcy.
If you take the future of your company seriously, the following five steps will help to not only keep your data but avoid embarrassing situations:
| 1. Identify Key employees. It is unrealistic for a business to preserve every piece of paper or every electronic file. Your most valuable element is your key employees, the ones whose documents are likely to be relevant in case problems arise. Be sure your backup strategy targets those employees. |  |
2. Implement a document destruction routine. Properly classify your information and determine what "left-over" information needs to be scanned/stored/filed or just properly destroyed.
3. Segregate documents. One of the most common problems is having employees deleting data by accident and not realizing it is gone until it is too late. A good backup system should enable you to recover the data; however, time will be lost while the information is recovered. A good practice we have found among some of our clients is to keep data for a common topic in a separate folder.
For example, email on subjects relevant to a topic should be saved in a separate electronic folder, and word processing or other non-email electronic documents should be saved in some common folder that reduces or eliminates the likelihood that they will be deleted accidentally.
| 4. Mirror your computer system. While it may be a relatively expensive and time-consuming procedure, some companies like to create and preserve an image of data on the system at a particular point in time. This is a procedure that must be repeated as often as possible. |  |
5. Backups. Your backup strategy depends on the nature of the company's computer system and the manner in which information is written to it. You need to identify how your backups are maintained and document the procedures for data retrieval with data from particular users capable of identification and segregation including any other critical data.
Your backups should be in a place that will eliminate the possibility that they will be lost or accidentally re-used. If you are using manual backups such as tapes, that means taking them out of your office and putting them in a secure location
We are here to help, if you need more information about backup practices and disaster recovery procedures feel free to contact us.
DataVault tips
How do I know my DataVault status?
Your daily report email means your backup was completed, so please keep checking your email as often as you can.
DataVault generates event reports if major events are detected and sends them to you via email.
The CITS Technical support team contacts you via email for any technical issues.