I talk a great deal about new technology and how it will impact the future of our businesses and our relationships with our families. No doubt that things like audio and video podcasts, video conferencing, cavernous email storage, multi-gigabyte music players, voice over IP, MP3 and internet based music systems, on and on will impact the choices we make and the way we conduct business with our families.
Today though, let me remind you of a little OLD technology which also needs your attention. So when’s the last time you did a VERIFIED backup of your company computer data and when’s the last time you stored a backup set OFF SITE????
The end of the year often means closing out the accounting system and setting things in motion for 2006. You also may be archiving old data from your funeral home management system and updating important Excel spreadsheets for the last time. This is also the perfect time to sit in front of the computer and make sure your backup system has been doing it’s job all year long (assuming you have been backing up your data all year). It is easy to take those systems for granted. For the most part these days, computers (particularly computer servers that just run the basics) run quite smoothly and consistently. Microsoft Windows and Apple Computers crash much less often than in years past. All of that tends to make it easier to take these systems for granted.
Regardless of how stable they seem to run, computers still represent systems with literally millions of electrical connections and literally billions of computer instructions all working simultaneously. Eventually something will fail and often that means a major breakdown without any warning. Depending upon the circumstances this can lead to data loss or just data stuck on a dead system with no way to move it out and over to another system. A good backup on a separate medium such as a tape or if you have a particularly small system, maybe onto a CD ROM can save you lots of lost time and energy.
Just as important, make sure you VERIFY that backup. It is not enough for the tape to run through the drive and for the computer to crunch along and look like something happened. It is always important to force the backup software to verify the work, to go back and re-read the tape and compare it with the data on the hard drive inside the computer. Most of the time you will find that everything ran perfectly well. Occasionally, though, the tape will stretch or the magnetic surface will have a defect or the tape drive heads may have a problem and the verification will not complete properly. (See your software manual for the proper commands to initiate a backup verification) If that’s the case, fix the problem, replace the tape, clean the drive, get in a technician, whatever it takes, because just ONE missing digit out of 100 million digits can make ALL the data USELESS!!! That’s the challenge with computers. They look robust but in actuality they can be extremely fragile.
Once you have that confirmed backup, get a copy of it off premises. You never know when the roof will leak or this time of year a pipe will burst or some other disaster strike and all your business data for months or often years will go totally lost. A relative few minutes now could easily save a week or more of reconstruction. And in some cases, the reconstruction could never completely happen, some data will disappear forever.
It happens in an instant and 10 years worth of information and contact lists evaporates. Don’t let it happen. Use the holiday season as the perfect time to give yourself and your business the gift of a complete and secure backup.
BT
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