Backups are a crucial part of your system that is often overlooked until they are needed to recover from a major incident.
Major incidents can come in many unexpected forms like a fire destroying your premises, storm damage and floods, a thief stealing your server or corruption in your data caused by an incorrectly shut down server.
If you have a current offsite backup you can be up and operational with minimal impact to your business. Over ACR’s history we have had to help a number of customers recover from these types of incidents and because they had offsite copies of backups we were able to get them access to their data and able to continue trading.
This was important to them as creditors continued to follow up on payments (some of which they had to provide proof to that they had already paid it) and they had to follow up debtors who had not yet paid. Their ability to access their data enabled them to provide quick reliable answers to these customers and suppliers that enabled them to get through a tough period and get back to trading as normal.
ACR has two methods for backing up your system data, these are; Cloud and USB Hard Drives.
Cloud backup with USB Hard Drives is the new method for backing up data. The cloud provides an additional level of redundancy to your Hard Drives, as you are not relying on one source of backup data; you have both the Hard Drives and the cloud copy. With this method a backup of your system is uploaded to a secure cloud location nightly as well as a copy saved to your local USB Hard Drive. The Hard Drive is then rotated either nightly or weekly so that 1 USB Hard Drive is kept off site at all times.
For additional redundancy, extra USB hard drives can be purchased from ACR to be included in the daily or nightly Hard Drive rotation allowing you to keep more copies offsite. Email support for more information.
The advantages of the cloud and USB Hard Drive methods are numerous;
- There are two copies of your backup made each night and stored at different locations (one in the cloud and one with you)
- The cloud copy can be converted to a live system to enable you to continue trading in any location with an internet connection.
The USB Hard Drive is fast to restore from reducing downtime compared to old Magnetic Tape backup methods.
Important: Cloud Backup offers the best contingency / redundancy plan available, with the additional benefit of being able to trade via the cloud if your server fails.