How good are your backups? Do you test and monitor your backups or just leave them up to luck?

If your server suddenly crashed and ALL your
data was erased, how long would it take before
your business was back up and running as usual?

If you aren’t sure, or if you think it would only be a short period of time, read on. Below are 3 common, costly misunderstandings most business owners have about their data backup that give them a false sense of security:

Misunderstanding #1: Believing That Tape Backups Are A Reliable Way To Secure Your Data...Wrong! Tape backups have an average failure rate of 100% (no, that’s not a typo). What makes this even worse is that tape backups will APPEAR to be working, giving you a false sense of security.

Misunderstanding #2: Relying On An Inexpensive, Automated Online Backup Provider To Backup Your Company Data. Tread carefully here and make sure that you’ve really done your homework on your chosen solution.

Here are a few questions to ask of any offsite backup provider before you trust your company data with them:

1.  Ask if you have the option to have your initial backup performed through a hard copy. With the amount of data on most company’s servers, an initial backup performed over the web can take months to complete.
2. Make sure that database files can be stored and recovered easily. Many cheap online backup services only hold simple office or media files, while ignoring your most important database files or making those incredibly difficult to recover.
3. Demand daily status reports. Any reputable backup service will send you a daily e-mail to verify that everything is backed up. The more professional solutions will allow you to notify more than 1 person (like your IT guy) in addition to yourself.

Misunderstanding #3: Trusting Their Backup Is Automatically Working Without Doing Periodic Test Restores. I see this happening a LOT – a business owner thinks their backups are working because they don’t see any error messages or apparent problems. Then, when they need to restore a file (or their entire server), they discover the backups stopped working MONTHS ago and all that data is gone.

Luck Is For Leprechauns...It Is NOT A Good Strategy When It Comes To Backing Up Your Data!

Contact us today and we'll help make sure you have a good backup system in place that will not only protect your data but provide you with a high level of business continuity.

How Automatic Updates Are Not So Automatic

Do you use automatic updates on your computer?  A lot of users will set their computer update settings to check and install updates automatically and then never give a second thought to updates again. 

Automatic updates are good except when they aren’t.  What the heck does that mean?  Well, as long as everything works the way it should, automatic updates can help ensure your computer is updated with the latest software and security patches.  However, if something goes wrong with an update to your computer, the whole system can fail.  That can mean that your computer can’t check for updates or install any new updates giving you the illusion that your computer is up-to-date with the latest patches. 

Update installation can fail for a variety of reasons and subsequently cause the update system to break.  Make sure you take some time each week to check on your updates and ensure everything is working properly.  

Here are a few ways you check your system to make sure the updates are working:

·         Check the status of windows updates:

·         Check your update history to see when updates were last installed:

If you notice that you haven’t had any updates in the last month or longer you will need to do some troubleshooting in order to get your Windows updates working again.  Check out the Windows Update Troubleshooter or Contact us and we’ll be happy to resolve any issues you are having with the update process and make sure your computer is safe and secure.