Disaster recovery should be an important part of a company’s long-term plan. When disasters like the World Trade Center or Fukushima happen, many companies just disappear. Some companies recover well because they’re prepared. That preparation is called a disaster recovery plan. If you’re not familiar with one, a disaster recovery plan is a way for a company to recover its information technology infrastructure in the event of a disaster. Do you back up your computer systems daily? Where do you store the backups? If they’re stored in a cabinet next to the machine being backed up, they’re virtually useless in the event of a disaster. A disaster here isn’t spilling coffee on your computer. While you do need a way to recover from that, a disaster recovery plan will define how a company gets operational again after something like an earthquake, hurricane, or tsunami hits, where there is serious damage to the infrastructure of the company or the area around the company. Some people call these business continuity plans, too. They can go by many names, but they all share the same purpose. One disaster recovery solution for keeping your company’s data safe is the Server Backup Manager from R1Soft. It provides a painless backup solution while offering flexible recovery options. In the simplest sense, it provides the means for you to restart the company quickly, provided you have the means to relocate the people elsewhere and get them back online. In a worst case scenario where you can’t get back online quickly, your data will just be waiting for you. The R1Soft Server Backup Manager has many features to ensure the safety of your data. Here are just a few:
Multi-tenant support: R1Soft ensures everyone’s data is separate and handles the unique needs of each customer.
Encryption: All data can be protected with AES-256 encryption on the backup server and across the network.
Flexible recovery plans: The major reason to go to a solution like the R1Soft Server Backup Manager is to handle worst-case scenarios, such as cases where you need bare-metal restore — replacing lost hardware. With that said, the solution is also flexible enough to handle those incidental cases where someone loses a single file.
Custom recovery points: It is up to you what your company’s data retention policy is. Just set up the system to have recovery points every so many minutes and retain them for so many hours, days, weeks, or months. Storage gets reused when the retention policy calls to remove old data.
The key thing that enables all these features is Continuous Data Protection® Technology. R1Soft Server Backup Manager backs up data at the block level instead of the file level. This can be done without the file server taking a performance hit. Even RAID systems get backed up. While a redundant array of independent disks might provide you with data redundancy or a performance boost, the replication isn’t sufficient from a worst-case disaster recovery plan. Replication doesn’t matter if the server is totally destroyed or inaccessible. Think of Hurricane Katrina, where everything was underwater for quite some time. What did RAID buy IT departments there? RAID is great for dealing with what you might think of as lightweight disaster recovery, where a piece of hardware fails. But if you need a long-term plan for recovering from those once-in-a-lifetime situations that seem to be happening all the more regularly lately, that’s where the Server Backup Manager works its magic. If you don’t have a disaster recovery plan just yet, here are some pointers to get you started. How much or how little you do depends on so many factors — not just geography. Money is a big factor, as most of what you spend preparing just sits there and is only used in a worst-case scenario. First off, do regular backups. The frequency here depends upon how much work you want to have to redo in the event of a disaster. And redoing the work may not even be an option in some cases. If your accounting system went down, could you collect any bills? Would you know who owes you money? Could you do payroll? If all you do is a weekly backup, and it's Friday when a disaster happens, that’s a full week of work lost. Second, detect failure. What happens if your network goes down? Would you even know, or would you only know if someone tried to explicitly use it? It is best to have in place quick detection mechanisms so that you don’t have to wait until customers try to connect and fail. They may just try another site that happens to be working at the time. Third, redundancy is important. Redundancy is not just having secondary communications lines if the cable happens to go out. Where would employees work? This includes having backup office space if appropriate — one close enough that people could travel to but on a different grid so that it would not be affected by utility failures. Or perhaps redundancy just means offering people computers so that they can work from home, provided a network is available. In conclusion, awareness is a key element, too. We all remember those fire drills we had in school. Nowadays, those have unfortunately turned into active-shooter drills. Being prepared for anything to happen and having a good backup strategy can go a long way to getting a business back up after a disaster hits. Finally, have a look at those two articles on dedicated server protection and data preservation if your are interrested in knowing more on the topic.