Linda posted on May 28, 2008 09:18
Hopefully, your answer to that question is one that will never be tested in real time. But in my 22 years at KI Technology Group, I have assisted clients who have had fires (at least 4), theft (2) and one flood. Then there are those who have had hard drive failures - too many to count!
In some of these cases, the clients involved had adequate backups and were able to recover easily. Yes, even the client who had the flood twelve years ago was able to recover and is still in business today. Two of the fires, however, involved a complete loss of data, including all backups and printed records. And one unlucky client who lost their computers to theft lost several months of data - not once, but twice.
Many of us handle off-site backup by assigning someone to take the most recent backup home. Hopefully, they will remember to do it and hopefully, our backups are working properly. We don't bother to attempt to restore any data from our backups until we have lost something and then we pace nervously waiting for the restore process to complete.
Not too long ago, backup options were either limited or expensive and usually very time consuming. Today there are many alternatives - from backup to low cost, reliable hard drives to redundant servers ready to take over in the event of a failure and everything in between. Automatic offsite backups are no longer cost prohibitive for small business owners, with available bandwidth oftentimes a bigger issue than the cost of the solution.
If you aren't 100% sure that your backups are working properly and that you have a current copy of your data offsite in a secure location, I strongly suggest that you consult with an experienced IT professional. The cost of a really good backup and disaster recovery solution may well be less than you expect. Wouldn't you sleep better at night knowing that your business is protected from disaster?