Why Backup

It is common knowledge that hard disks do not last forever. Therefore it is a certainty that at some point you will suffer equipment failure. Why let that failure result in information loss? Research shows that corporate and personal data can all too easily be lost, corrupted, stolen or deleted. The outcome can be catastrophic. IDC and the DTI estimate that 60% of data is held on PC’s. 7 out of 10 companies go out of business after a major data loss. Every year 10% of laptops are stolen and 15% suffer hardware failure.

There is no substitute for off premises file backups. That is why major corporations have chosen this method above all others for disaster recovery.

Why is the tape drive not sufficient?

Office Disaster: Tape backups do nothing to protect you from fire, flood or theft. Would they protect you from power surge, vandalism, viruses, user error or malicious employees?

SMD stores only critical data and provides peace of mind afforded by having the data archived away from your office.

Reliability: It’s sad but true that hardware fails, always at the wrong time and always catastrophically. Imagine the shock of retrieving your backup tape, placing it in the drive and finding the data is corrupt.

SMD software verifies every transfer and ensures data validity. Also all SMD archived files are stored on mirrored disk servers.

Convenience: Current in-office backup methods always include an element of human intervention i.e. changing tapes, manually transferring files, changing disks mid-transfer. Backup strategies are hard to monitor and enforce. There are times when the person responsible for backups will not be available or will be prevented from doing so by other work commitments.

To backup files using SMD, load the software onto the computer in your office connected to the Internet, assign the files and directories for backup and let the software do the rest.

Media: Saving to tapes, CD’s and removable media such as Zip’s and floppies may be simple enough but it’s not instant and requires some degree of commitment to make sure it’s done day in day out. What’s more storage media can come in for some pretty rough handling, which can render data useless and impossible to recover. Once stored where is the media kept? If it’s safely offsite it’s no good to an on-site field engineer or a manager in the middle of a meeting.

With SMD there is no media and when you want your data it takes just seconds to retrieve any chosen file.

Costs: Current office backup equipment is very expensive. Media tapes, cleaning tapes and disks are expensive, easily lost or stolen and need constant replacement. SMD is a scalable solution that will grow as your company need grows.

With SMD there is no up-front capital expenditure and no need for special equipment or media