The number one thing you should be doing with your computer today

Being an all round computering champion, people often ask me “David, what’s the most important thing I should be doing with my computer?” and my answer is “Clear your internet history.”

And then I talk about backup. We have a saying in the office:

“There are two kinds of people. Those who have lost data, and those who are about to.”

It’s amazing how lax most people are regarding backup, and it makes no sense! How silly would you feel having to re-key hours of data due to a lost file? How devastated would you be losing precious photos due to a failed hard drive? You wouldn’t be able to make the ultimate hipster Christmas present, Then and Now Recreated Photos! How destroyed would you feel losing your entire business due to encryption malware?

The good news is backup does not need to be expensive! Typically speaking the more you spend, the quicker you will get back up (zing!) and running. A basic backup program is included in Professional and Server versions of Windows. Spend some more money and you can do granular file restoration and SQL database backup with BackupAssist. More still and you have the Rolls-Royce, Veeam, which has Instant VM Recovery – you can start a virtual server directly from a backup file, giving a truly amazing RTO – Recovery Time Objective.

One more step up and you are moving away from backup and towards Availability. By using redundant hardware in a Microsoft Failover Cluster, a physical server can fail and virtual machines will migrate in real time to other servers in the cluster. So where other organisations would be reaching for the backup drive, users in a Failover Cluster (or otherwise referred to as Highly Available) environment don’t even notice a hardware failure – but backup is still very important in these configurations.

For businesses, the conversation is simply one of finances.

“How much does it cost my business when the computers are down?”

If your business will die due to missed deliverables, zero staff productivity without computers or no way to get orders in, it makes sense to spend some money to avoid that. If your business can handle being down for a couple of days then the cost of a HA system or sophisticated backup software is not justified.

[mk_image src=”https://www.crt.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/CRT-Dell-Server-Rack.jpg” image_width=”480″ image_height=”724″ crop=”true” svg=”false” lightbox=”false” frame_style=”simple” target=”_self” caption_location=”inside-image” align=”left” margin_bottom=”10″ animation=”right-to-left” title=”An actual HA System installed by CRT” desc=”We’re professionals AND we have fancy cameras.”]

We’re not much into selling on the blog but I highly recommend you get an expert to evaluate your backup plan. Not just your backup software, but the whole plan surrounding it – the number of drives you backup to, do you take them off-site each night, what is the process when a restore is needed, the entire enchilada. Your data is one of your business’ most critical assets and not easily replaced.

In fact, it is so important I’m willing to put my money Arthur’s money where my mouth his mouth is. Email me (it’s already formatted just enter your name and phone number) and we’ll organise a free, no obligation chat about your current backup situation and identify any potential pitfalls.