Total Contentz Disaster Restoration Site

What If This Happened to
Your Business?

When protecting your business data, you should have at least the following three systems in place: RAID, offsite backup, and disk imaging.

RAID

RAID stands for "redundant array of inexpensive disk." It is a technology of having multiple hard drives in your server to protect your data and allows your server to continue operating when a hard drive fails. Your operating system, applications and files are duplicated on two or more disks, so if a single disk fails, you can continue to work until the failed disk is replaced (TIP: don't wait as the other disks will typically fail within days or weeks.)

RAID is a business continuity method, not a data backup method. Yes, it preserves your data if your hard drive fails, put won't protect your data against fire, flood, earthquake or theft or other disaster.

Offsite Data Backup

Every business needs to keep a backup of their data offsite in case of a natural disaster or theft. The easiest method is to use an offsite data backup service such as AxiVault which encypts your data then uploads it each night to a secure data center. This method is easy, automated and fully managed and monitored by our techs.

Another method of offsite backup is to use external hard drives which are rotated offsite. If using external hard drives as your offsite backup strategy, you must use data backup or disk imaging software that will encrypt the data in case the hard drives are stolen from your car or home. This method is a manual process which makes it inconsistent and less reliable as the offsite data backup service above.

Disk Imaging

If you only backup your data files and disaster strikes, you will have to purchase a new server, install the operating system, install updates and patches, configure the server, reinstall all your applications, and restore your data. This process may take 10 to 14 days. Must businesses cannot be without an operational server for that long.

Luckily there is readily available disk imaging software available that will allow you to restore an image of your old server onto new server hardware. This will cut your recovery time to a 2 or 3 days.

Putting It All Together

1. Verify that your server is using hardware-based RAID.

2. Subscribe to an offsite data backup service, such as AxiVault.

3. Use disk imaging software with an external hard drive or NAS device. A copy of the disk image needs to be offsite in case of disaster.