Disaster Protection Planning FAQ

First Some Questions

If something goes wrong with your computer how will you and/or your business cope?

Are your staff trained in contingency procedures to use while the computer system is being repaired?
Hint: Larger companies have pre-printed books of transaction forms for use when their point of sale units are inoperable.

Do you perform a regular (daily?) backup of your computer system to ensure speedy recovery after a hardware failure?

Are your staff trained how to restore a backup?

Do you store the latest backup off-site? If you have a fire that destroys the computer, or somebody steals it, can you install a new one and and quickly restore your programs and data?

Do you ensure the backup medium (disk, tape, cd etc) is always in good condition? Disks, tapes and re-recordable CD's wear out after a period of time and/or certain number of recordings!

How much data can you afford to lose?

If you backup every two days you can obviously cope easily with re-entering two days transactions!
Hint: Most of our clients backup daily, some also do a midday backup!

Do you have a backup rotation?

If somebody made a major mistake two days ago do you have a backup to restore?
Hint: We recommend you have disk/tape/cd labelled for each day of the week, so on Monday you backup onto Mondays disk/tape/cd, Tuesday onto Tuesdays disk/tape/cd etc etc. Many of our clients do an extra backup at the end of each month and file it permanently, some do this at the end of each week!

Is your current backup method adequate or the most efficient for your needs?

A few years ago diskettes were the only reasonable cost method for backing up. Now Zip Drives, CD Writers, Backup Tape Units, or even removable hard drives are all affordable, can store more information and are normally faster and easier to use.

Keep an eye on your backups for capacity exceeded messages!

We retain more information and for much longer periods now. Our point of sale and back office system backups easily fitted onto a diskette a few years ago. However the trend is to keep historical information so the capacity of a diskette is quickly exceeded. When this happens you need to talk to your supplier/administrator about increasing the backup capacity.

Another example is when tape backup facilities start calling for a second tape. Often you can purchase larger capacity tapes, or maybe install a new higher capacity (often faster) unit.

Currently recordable (once only) CD's are cheap, have a large capacity and have become very reliable, so they are popular. The only downside is they take a while to burn (record) the data compared to the other, more expensive methods.