Thursday, August 30, 2012

Disaster Recovery Due to Human Error

Human error happens even with the most diligent individuals. If a new employee or even an owner accidentally deletes important data, it can take drastic disaster recovery measures to restore it. While there are some programs that can find and restore deleted data, it is always a gamble that businesses cannot afford to take. Human error can even occur in the restoring phase where the backed up data becomes invalid. No matter what the case may be, there are options to ensure that data can be recovered quickly and easily.

Human Error with Data

There are many cases in which data can be destroyed or deleted. While this might not seem like a common occurrence, it happens quite often in the business world. When this happens, customer data or weeks of work can be irretrievable. What would happen if your businesses customer database was accidentally destroyed? Would customers understand if months of work suddenly disappeared? Of course not, but an appropriate disaster recovery plan would practically eliminate this issue from occurring.

Human Error Restoring Data

While human error can be reduced greatly with the proper measures, there is always a chance of it occurring. If data is properly backed up, but gets damaged while being restored, what ramifications would this have on a business? Would they be able to clone the drive and hope to retrieve the data? Honestly, any chance of losing data would be too much for a company to risk. This is especially true with the amount of backup options that are available. The cost of these solutions is very minimal compared to the loss of company data and perhaps company downtime caused by such an occurrence.

Backup Solutions

Errors can happen even in the most restricted of systems. Regardless of file permissions, accidents do happen. These would call for an appropriate backup system that not only syncs current data, but has a solution for retrieving older data as well. Ideally, a backup solution would include:

Data replication: Data that is replicated to an off-site facility is typically used to ensure damaged data can be restored promptly. Not only does this solution provide one of the best options for recovery, but it is utilized by many of the largest businesses in the world. It is a proven method for disaster recovery.

Point-in-time Restoration: While data replication ensures that the latest files are retrievable, deleted data might also be removed from the backup. In optimal situations, data replication would be accompanied by a point-in-time restoration option. This would allow the data to be recovered closest to its stable state.

The data and information a business collects is what allows them to retain its client base. If something were to happen to the company's data, it could possibly lose months of work, client information, and virtually every important piece of data that it has collected. However, this does not have to be an issue if a business has a robust disaster recovery system in place. Not only can a company's data be damaged, but the backups can as well. A tiered solution would safeguard data and would offer the highest possibility of data restoration.

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