The Perils and Pitfalls of Off-site Backups.
In vogue for some time now is the use of off-site backups. These services are being marketed heavily as the end-all solution to various program and data backup issues.
While having an off-site backup process in place is a good idea, it is only as reliable as the providers due diligence to protect their systems.
A recent example of this happened with owners of Sidekick phones, which are made by Microsoft and sold by T-Mobile USA. The servers which Microsoft retains customer and account data crashed recently. Not only did this wipe out customers data, but the phones were plagued by outage problems for over a week. Apparently, there were no good backups of customer phone data at Microsoft.
Some users attempted to restart their phones by removing the battery, which erases the data on this particular device. Normally, the data is restored to the phone when the service connects with the server. However, since the server data was gone, there was nothing to restore the phone settings from. This means that ALL of the phone info was completely lost.
Similarly, if something like this were to happen to a business server, the results could end-up be catastrophic for a business.
The main point here is that when it comes to system backups, redundancy is the key to properly protect your systems. It’s always better to have multiple solutions to disaster recovery than to not have them…
Please contact the CCS Retail Systems Support Department for a review of your current back-up systems.