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Sometimes things happen that remind me of why we do things the way that we do… Recently, we’ve been speaking with a potential client (“The Organization”) who has been working with one of our competitors but having some concerns about response time.  We met with them to find out if IntelliSystems could be a resource for them.

Our competitor has the users of this organization sharing their data off one of those disposable network attached storage (NAS) devices that you see in Wal-Mart…   presumably because they didn’t want to spend much money and nobody took the time to explain why this decision might be important in the future.

Out of curiosity, I asked how often their backup was being tested to make sure that they could restore their important information in the event of a fire, failure or human mistake and how long it was generally taking to get all of that information back and in a usable state.  The answer didn’t surprise me because it’s the answer we hear most frequently:

At the end of our meeting, we agreed that IntelliSystems would just listen out in case “The Organization” needed us in the future.

The future wasn’t too far away. We received a call within two weeks indicating that the shared data was gone for some reason and our competitor had not been able to put a set of eyes on it for at least two days.  We were basically being put on alert that a change might be in the making.

The competitor took the device, attempted to tinker around with recovering data themselves for a few more days before finally deciding to send it off to a professional data recovery company. The quote? $6000. To possibly recover SOME of the data. Setting aside the fact that this is three times what we normally see for most data recovery operations, think about it for a minute. Six thousand dollars… at least two weeks… some of the data… This is a small organization we’re talking about- 3 users. That’s $2000 per user.

Needless to say, “the organization” is devastated. They’re scrambling around trying to figure out how to recover some of this information from old emails, etc… I hate to hear it because it was easily preventable.

Lets look at what all went wrong here. The client’s important data was being trusted to a $200 network storage device that is intended to store copies of mp3 files on. This was completely inappropriate for anything resembling important data.

Next, nobody accepted responsibility for backing up the data, making sure that it was backed up and could be restored to a usable state in the event of a failure or disaster. The client thought the provider was doing it. The IT provider… one of our well-known competitors whose name you know… well… who knows what they thought.

(I hear all you Carbonite and Mozy users snickering out there- when was the last time that you tried to restore all of your data? Did it take less than a long weekend? Online backup is better than nothing but its not suitable as your sole backup and its not right for all people- particularly people with sizable amounts of data that they need to be able to positively restore in a short period of time)

Sometimes I waffle about whether we should insist that all of our clients have a comprehensive backup and disaster recover solution. These things cost real money even when we provide them as a convenient add-on for our regular preventive service offerings. Sometimes I wonder if it’s absolutely necessary for us to test each and every one of these backups each month to make sure that when a client needs them most, the process will work as planned.

Stories like this remind me why it is so crucially important for a business with important data to take these matters seriously. If someone is not testing the process regularly in the manner it will be used when you need it most, it’s just a gamble with bad odds.

I encourage any of our clients to watch us resurrect their server or data- no charge. We rehearse repeatedly to make sure that we can be as prepared as possible when the time comes. Ask your provider to let you watch them bring up your server after a mock disaster. I’d be interested to know what they say.

Got a disaster to share? Email me at chrish@intellisystems.com or call me at 706-722-2024.