Orange County, CA – Always make sure your backups are in good working order. Here is a story of a company reports to be out of business because they lost 300 GB if their IP and company operations history – GitLab.com melts down after wrong directory deleted, backups fail. The story mentions Gitlabs.com outgrew the cloud and that is why this happened. No, they simply had bad backups and they did not check to make sure they had an ability to recover before doing work on the storage system. Data loss disasters can happen in the cloud, too. So make sure you have your backup operations in order. Disaster can strike in innumerable ways no matter your IT operation model.

Backups need to be constantly examined to make sure they are working. Here is a partial list of questions you should be asking when doing your due diligence:

1.       Do we have a backup system in place?

2.       Is it running?

3.       What errors, if any, is it generating? How are you fixing the errors?

4.       Do we have the data copied off-site? If so, where and how?

5.       Is our backup a mapped drive that can be susceptible to ransomware?

6.       Are we backing up the right stuff? When was the last time you did a thorough review of our entire infrastructure to be sure we are getting everything important?

Quiz your IT staff or your IT provider from time-to-time no matter who they are. Include Alvaka in that querying. There are many more questions you should be asking, but above is a good start.

Did you know Alvaka Networks has a Backup Assessment we conduct do clients? We ask from periodically if we can perform this assessment, but you need to say “yes” so we are authorized to do it. I recommend you do it at least twice per year. Doing so will spot problems before you go too far along and end-up with an unrecoverable situation. I have seen situations where a new server was added 1.5 years prior and it never got added to the backup job. And because no one was inspecting the system periodically, when it crashed 18 months later there was no recovery of the SQL database. Don’t be that person/company.

If you want us to do a backup assessment give us a call at 949 428-5000 or email info@alvaka.net and request one ASAP. It is good to be constantly anxious about your backup systems and security. Complacency can lead to loss.

Here are a couple of other important and related backup blogs:

Some Good Questions and Answers on Backup and Disaster Recovery

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