Backup
One
the most over-looked yet most important aspects of ensuring data integrity,
is backup. The commercial world is replete with horror stories of non-backed
up failures. One company, after losing all records in a fire, were resigned
to calling clients and asking them if they owed money and how much! Not
surprising that the company went to the wall.
Backup in simple terms, is
storing a copy of your data, so that, in a disaster event, the data can be
restored quickly and completely.
What to Backup
When backing up data, it makes
sense to backup only the data that is being created or modified daily by
your organisation. This will include:
· Company accounts and other
financial records
· Client accounts
· Customer database
· Employee's personal accounts
· Document templates
· Inventory system
· Presentations
· Users data
· Registry
It doesn't make sense to backup
the entire contents of the hard drive; this will take too long and will use
up a substantial amount of magnetic storage, therefore costing more money.
Should a hard drive fail then the operating system and applications can be
restored from the original CDs. Only the data items (and any similar ones)
from the bulleted list, should be backed up. |
