An Unwanted Christmas Present

This article appeared in January '03 and was inspired by actual events. The events covered in this article present an excellent case study in how NOT to prepare for a disaster. Maintenance plans such as those offered by On-Site Support can help prevent your business from having a similar problem.

A friend of mine (who I'll call John to save him public embarrassment) who owns a small business here in Spartanburg recently received an unwanted and quite expensive Christmas present – a $4,200 bill for data recovery services. John called me one morning in mid-December to see if I could figure out what was wrong with his server, as he could not get it to turn on. After troubleshooting, we finally determined that the problem was a hard drive. Unfortunately, it turned out to be the hard drive that contain all of the crucial data for his business. Without that data, his business would have to re-do hundreds of hours of work.

My first question was “Do you have a good backup?” Several months before, we had installed a tape drive and I had shown him how to backup the server with it. However, being a very busy business owner, he had not always taken the time to run the backup, and, more importantly, he had not tested the backups. John told me he thought that his last good backup was about 30 days old. This was not good news! But it was about to get worse. I tried to run a restore from the tape he thought contained the backup. The software told me that the tape was blank. I tried 3 other tapes and all were blank. Things were not looking up.

We had one last hope. John said he had an old tape at his house that had a full backup on it. At first it looked promising, as the tape appeared to contain a good backup. I started a restore and crossed my fingers. The next day, John called me and said that the tape had restored all the directories, but none of the files. I went to his office and read the logs. Every single file on the tape was listed as corrupt and un-restorable. Now he was really in deep trouble. He had 10 employees and no data for them to work with.

Doing some research on the web, I found a data recovery service in Charlotte. We overnighted the drive to them. The next day, they called and said they could restore the data for us. The cost - $4,200. At this point my friend was really over a barrel so he agreed to the price. He received his data several days later and was finally able to get his business running at full speed again. The total cost for this hard drive crash came to nearly $10,000 when the cost of lost employee productivity, my time, a new hard drive, and the data recovery service was all added up.

This expense could have all been avoided if John had done two things – run his backups on a regular basis and tested them. There are many ways to backup your data, from a 25 cent floppy disk to a $3,000 tape drive. Any of them can be reliable, but any can also be useless if you do not check them regularly. I have seen several examples over the years of companies that thought they were backing up their data, but were simply doing nothing more than changing one bad tape for another each day. Nearly all backup software has the ability to create a log. Get in the habit of reading those logs every day to check for errors. If you see errors, try to determine why they occurred and how to fix them.

The only way to know for sure that your backup is good is to test it by attempting to restore some of the data from one or more of your tapes or other backup media. If you are able to restore successfully, you know that you have a good backup and you can sleep better at night. If not, you know you have a problem and can work to fix it before you have a costly failure. Be sure when testing that you don't accidentally overwrite newer data.

Don't let your business be a victim of sloppy backup procedures. Create a system. Document it so that more than one person knows how to run it. Test it! Take your tapes off-site. If your business follows these simple steps, you can recover from any type of disaster without the tremendous worry and expense that my friend had to go through.

Additional Information

Planning for a disaster is one of the most important things a small business owner can do to protect their business. Fire, theft, and malicious employees all have the capability to ruin your business without proper planning. Here are a few links to some good articles I found on the web that will help you with disaster recovery planning.

If you would like On-Site Support to help your business develop a disaster recovery plan, feel free to email us at any time: