Don't wait for disaster to strike. Three ways you can backup now!
Is it time you thought about having a more secure and reliable backing-up system in place? If you find your organisation is incurring more data than you can manage to back-up, either on an external hard drive or online, it’s probably time you thought of implementing a disaster recovery system.
Disaster strikes and SCIP save a client’s data in a couple of hours:
There are three types of backups: local drive backup, local disaster recovery and offsite disaster recovery. Here we way up the pros and cons of each method and give you an outline of the costs.
1. Backup to local drive
Simple backup of data to a different part of the server.
Pros – software is free and recovering files is instantaneous
Cons – should the server stop functioning you lose all the normal and backup data
Costs – Software is free. It usually takes 30 minutes to set-up and SCIP can do it for £15 or you can do it yourself.
2. Local Disaster Recovery
This involves two external hard drives that are swapped over weekly so one copy of all the data is always offsite.
Pros – in the event of catastrophic server failure, a new system can be recovered with all the old data
Cons – the hard drives must be swapped weekly and somebody must take it offsite with them. Any data saved between the last backup being removed from the server will be lost. I.e. if the hard drive at home has the backup from last Friday and a fire happens the next Wednesday you will lose all data that was saved between Friday and Wednesday.
Costs: £120 for two drives + time to set-up = £150 + VAT
3. Offsite disaster recovery
This involves backing up all data across the internet to either another office location with an additional server or paying a 3rd party company to store it.
Pros – all data is completely up-to-date when recovering from disaster and it is fully automated so it doesn’t require anybody swapping things over.
Cons – it is the most expensive option
Costs: £2.50/GB/month
For more information on backup strategies and recovery systems, check out this factsheet on ICT Knowledgebase.
SCIP offer offsite disaster recovery to all its clients including charities, non-profit organizations and businesses. If you would like to talk to the technical department about your needs, email andy@scip.org.uk or call 01273 234049.
