Backups are a crucial part of your system that is often overlooked until they are needed to recover from a major incident.
Be it a fire destroying your premises, a thief stealing your server or a 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 small 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 to be able to continue to trade. 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 offer two options for backing up your system data, these are; to the cloud and USB Hard Drives or the traditional magnetic tape backup.
- Using tape backups is an effective way to backup your data as long as the last successful tape is taken offsite each day and another tape is inserted into the tape drive.
- 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 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.
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.
- The USB Hard Drive is quicker to restore from than a traditional tape.
Important Cloud Backup offers the best contingency / redundancy plan available, with the additional benefit of being able to trade via the cloud if and when your server fails.