If you’re like most business owners, you likely have a back-up disk to restore your server data in the event of an emergency. But did you know a back-up disk isn’t enough to keep you fully protected and minimize downtime? This type of backup is referred to as a ‘data-based’ backup and is simply not good enough anymore. Whether you experience a total loss or repairable damage to your server, having an ‘image-based’ backup device that saves data to the cloud every hour is your best opportunity for getting your team back to work quickly. Here’s why.

Even With A Back-Up Disk, A Total Loss Could Have You Down for 10 Days or more!

If your server is housed in house, you probably have your back-up disk stored in a different location to protect against incidents like theft or water damage. Theoretically, this keeps your data safe in the event of a total loss of the server. However, even if your back-up disk survives the incident that took out your server, it could take as many as 10 business days to get a new server – then we’ve got to re-install everything and THEN restore the data; and without a server, the back-up disk isn’t any help!

We know you can’t be down for that long, but unfortunately that’s how long it takes to:

1. Receive your new server
2. Reconfigure the server
3. Restore/reinstall all the software
4. Restore the data
5. Reconnect all of your business’s computers

Even if your server isn’t a total loss, if it isn’t working properly for one reason or another a technician will need to visit your workplace to address those issues before installing the back-up disk. Depending on the problem, this could take a couple days to complete.

Downtime is Expensive

Even if we can fix your server quickly, copying data from the backup disk to your server can take hours. During this time, no one on your team can do anything. That’s time that you are paying your employees while no work is being completed.

According to IBM, the average infrastructure failure costs businesses $100,000 an hour! Talk about a real pull-your-hair-out nightmare

Protect Your Business With An Image-based Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) System

At Info-Tech Montreal, we always recommend that our clients move away from a data-based disk backup solution to an image-based BDR solution.

This BDR device creates images of your server – not just the raw data! – and stores it in on the device itself AND in the cloud. If your server goes down for any reason, we can simply ‘startup’ your server with the image we have of it. It is also able to copy images of the server each hour, as opposed to the back-up disk which usually only backs up each evening, sometimes only each week.

This means if, for example, an employee accidentally downloads a virus that affects everything, we can restore everyone’s files up to the most recent hour.

If you have questions about your disaster recovery plan, need to know how much it would cost you to be down, or if you’re simply interested in learning more about our services to help minimize your downtime, contact us today! We’re always happy to chat and find a solution that works best for you.