One of the worst case scenarios that can afflict a small business is a fire at your premises. This is traumatic enough but will be made worse by the realisation that all your PC's, servers and all your backup media have been reduced to charred remnants. As long as you have some form of backup that survives this incident then you have some chance of picking up the pieces.
One option is to keep your backup media in a fire-proof safe. Another is to ensure that some backups are taken off-site on a regular basis. If you are backing up onto a disposable medium such as DVD-R then this is no problem as you can just periodically take one of these off-site, say once a week.
Alternatively you might be backing up onto some form of reuseable, removeable media - DVD-RW, tape or removeable hard drive. In this case a simple approach is to establish a set of six tapes (or whatever) and to label these Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday1 and Friday2. Then use these on the appropriate day and every Monday take one of the Friday volumes off-site and return the other one. In this way your off-site backup will never be more than six working days old.
Finally you might be backing up to non-removeable media, such as a separate hard drive or to another machine on the network. In this case a good option might be to use two external hard drives and to rotate these on- and off-site in the same manner as the Friday tapes in the previous case.
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Geographical coverage: AlphaOne Computing Services
provides a range of small business computer support and I.T. services throughout Sussex, including
Brighton, Hove, Shoreham, Worthing, Steyning, Burgess Hill,
Haywards Heath, Crawley, Lewes, Newhaven, Seaford, Uckfield and Eastbourne.
