Risk Analysis = Constant Vigilance

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How much risk are you willing to take with your data? Could your company survive if your systems crashed and your data wasn’t available for a day, a week or a month? Chances are you’d be in the same boat as so many other companies that go out of business when their data is lost.
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So what do you do to protect yourself? The answer might seem a bit obvious, but it isn’t. Sure, you need to back up your data. That’s pretty obvious. What isn’t obvious is where and how you do it.
If your business does a lot of transactions or makes modifications to files frequently, then you need a backup product that works as hard as you do. You need to keep constant vigilance over your data. In this case, you should consider a software program that will make constant backups of your data when it changes.
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If your company makes relatively few changes on an hourly basis — changes that can be easily recreated if they are lost temporarily — then you might consider a product that backs up your system on a daily basis. If you are in business, then it is probably too risky to just do weekly backups; too much data could be lost.
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Now consider where you want to put your backups. Backing up locally means you can access your backups very quickly. This is a great way to do full system restores or to grab a file or folder that was accidently deleted without delay.
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However, local backups have their issues as well. If your company is hit by a natural disaster, such as a flood, earthquake, fire or storm and the local office is without power or destroyed, then you will want to have an offsite backup as well. Backing up to a cloud-based service, in conjunction with local backup, gives you the best of both worlds. Cloud backup gives you the ability to restore your system anywhere, anytime. It will be a slower process than a network-attached backup server, but if that backup server is also destroyed or unable to power up, it’s your best alternative.
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Experts recommend that you opt for a backup solution that provides you with the greatest flexibility — local and remote, file-based for quick backups with the ability to do a bare-metal restore, and a simple interface that will make the entire process easy when you in the midst of a stressful event.
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For more information on cloud- and local-based backups with continuous data protection, visit Genie9 at http://www.genie9.com
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