Being an owner and lead consultant for Resolve Technology I get to meet with some nice people who sometimes turn into clients. During these meetings I find out some interesting ways other computer guys are handling small business technology. Yesterday, I met with a CFO (Joan) whose job it is to oversee the outsourcing of this critical function. I find that most people at this level of the organization are either too busy or don’t quite have a handle on technology. Quite frankly, this is a tough business for any one person to wrap their head around.
The reason for the meeting was simple. They need to implement (like yesterday) a better backup system because the one they have doesn’t work. They lost a server and when they tried to restore from tape backup they got a bunch of errors. Guess how many tapes they used for their backups? Yep, one.
Keeping in mind hindsight is always 20/20. There are three problems here. First, you need more than one tape and they need to be rotated. Second, tape technology (while it still works) is prone to these types of physical or logical errors. Third, they didn’t run test restores to make sure that the backup would actually work when all hell broke loose!
If you’d like a little more background on some better ways to backup you can download an article I wrote on the topic: NHBR Backup Article.