Disaster Recovery

[stugster]

Hi All,

With news of the Forth Road Bridge being closed to all traffic until New Year, I thought it would be interesting to hear what everyone does from a Disaster Recovery point of view.

When exceptional events occur, what's your plan of attack to continue running the business with minimum disruption? What do you do if your office burns to the ground, or floods? What's your plan of attack when your internet goes off for an entire day? What about your phones?

We've gone to great lengths to make sure we can continue operating from anywhere in Scotland. Our data is backed up to a remote location so we have at least two copies of it. Our phones are hosted on VoIP, so we can plug in a handset or soft-phone anywhere and take calls. Our office has two internet connections - from different suppliers on different technologies (Copper pair and Virgin coax). We've even got UPS for temporary power blips and a petrol generator that will keep us up and running for 4 hours (before we have to send someone to buy more petrol).

What do you do? How do you keep your business operating in times of crisis?

 

[LucidCaledonia]

I used to work in a large IT department, and the main focus of my role was backup and disaster recovery, so I really don't slack on this. Fortuantely I don't have a lot to lose in the event of a disaster. All of my knowledge and skill are in my head, and as soon as I've done work for a client, that's the end of it really. I only need to perform usual backups, and it serves me well.

 

[Scottish Business Owner]

I think you'd be surprised how many don't have a plan for this. There will be a single point of failure in many IT infrastructures.

Most of my data is in the cloud so as long as I have internet I could survive probably.

My office job is on the 7th floor so if that floods then I'm guessing the problem will be bigger than getting access to the internet

 

[Allegrif]

I like my backups to have backup, and my backups of my backups to have backups

I also own a couple of high profile websites, so I have to keep these backed up very regularly. On of them is in excess of 50GB though, so it's not a simple process. I have to download the database and the files to my desktop PC via FTP, which takes about 24 hours, then ZIP it up and send it to my various hard drives in different locations - my own cloud if you will.

This subject has already bit me in the bum once, and I'm very conscious not to let it happen again.

 

[saltire]

I've learned the hard way on this - lost alot of data more than once

You need to take this seriously and I do now.

Offsite backups, shadow protect and even cloud backups are all part of my process now.

 

[stugster]

On of them is in excess of 50GB though, so it's not a simple process. I have to download the database and the files to my desktop PC via FTP, which takes about 24 hours, then ZIP it up and send it to my various hard drives in different locations - my own cloud if you will.

How many of those files are changing on a daily basis? I'd bet around 90% of that data is constant and doesn't change. If you used backup software (R1Soft, Veaam, Cobian) then it would do incremental backups and you wouldn't have to waste so much bandwidth and time pulling a backup

 

[Allegrif]

How many of those files are changing on a daily basis? I'd bet around 90% of that data is constant and doesn't change. If you used backup software (R1Soft, Veaam, Cobian) then it would do incremental backups and you wouldn't have to waste so much bandwidth and time pulling a backup

I've never heard of any of that. How does it work? Can you just add lists of files and folders to a sort of 'these don't change' list?

 

[stugster]

The software itself is clever and compares the files before it pulls them to your remote source.

Have a peek at this: http://www.techradar.com/news/softw...kup-software-11-programs-we-recommend-1137924