If your server suddenly crashed and ALL your data was erased, how long would it take before your business was back up and running as usual?

If you aren’t sure, or if you think it would only be a short period of time, read on. Below are a few common, costly misunderstandings most business owners have about their data backup that give them a false sense of security:

Misunderstanding #1: Relying On An Inexpensive, Automated Online Backup Provider To Backup Your Company Data. Tread carefully here and make sure that you’ve really done your homework on your chosen solution. Here are a few questions to ask of any offsite backup provider before you trust your company data with them:

Ask if you have the option to have your initial backup performed through a hard copy. With the amount of data on most company’s servers, an initial backup performed over the web can take months to complete.
Make sure that database files can be stored and recovered easily. Many cheap online backup services only hold simple office or media files, while ignoring your most important database files or making those incredibly difficult to recover.
Demand daily status reports. Any reputable backup service will send you a daily e-mail to verify that everything is backed up. The more professional solutions will allow you to notify more than 1-person (like your IT guy) in addition to yourself.

Misunderstanding #2: Trusting Their Backup Is Automatically Working Without Doing Periodic Test Restores. We see this happening a LOT – a business owner thinks their backups are working because they don’t see any error messages or apparent problems. Then, when they need to restore a file (or their entire server), they discover the backups stopped working months ago and all that data is gone.

Want To Know For Sure If Your Data Is Safe? Fill out the form to the right to request a Data Recovery Assessment.

Visit NCIbackup.com for more detailed solutions.