Eternitek |
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Eternitek |
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Most people would agree that computer data is one of their most valuable organizational assets. What would you do if all your donor and accounting files were suddenly gone forever because a hard drive on your server crashed? This could also happen through disgruntled employees, accidental deletion, corruption in one of your software programs or even because of an attack from an outside hacker. The first line of defense in protecting your ministry data is to perform regular backups.
A backup is when you make a copy of your important data and keep it in a safe place, so you can restore that data if it ever becomes necessary later. The most common method of backing up data is to use a tape drive and backup tapes. The critical thing to understand is that you MUST do something…any kind of data backup is better than none at all. If you ignore your data, it just might go away!
Instead of keeping just one backup copy of your data, you should set up a system that keeps copies of your data for set time intervals (every day, every week, every month, every quarter, every year, etc.). Use a different tape or disk for each backup you make and then label them by date, and you will soon have a library of archived data backups you can restore from as needed.
Why go through all that trouble? Well, suppose you find out that a very important Excel spreadsheet is now corrupted and you can’t open it. You haven’t used it for several months, and your backup strategy has been to keep writing over the same tapes every week. Chances are all the backups of that Excel file are probably corrupted, too! But what if you would’ve used a different strategy and kept an archive of your backups for each month of the previous year? You could then easily go back in time to the month when you knew the Excel file was still working and restore that copy…the issue would be quickly & easily resolved. Time travel can be pretty useful sometimes!
