Advice on Back Up software (and hardware) just to be sure and safe

googler

that wrote: »

I am in IT for many decades, never seen any computer to be turned on or off by pressing the cd button.

The OP is saying the business owner simply verified it was on and running by opening the CD tray. Power to CD drive = machine switched on.

Not that they switched it on or off by this method.

googler

OP, as an aside, many years back I was in the IT dept of a large financial co.

At first, backup was a daily operation of shuttling large IBM magnetic tapes between data centre and offsite storage. Then it became smaller tapes, and data cartridges, and eventually reached the point where the co had a mirror of the main data centre (same CPU, same disk drives, etc), with the mirror linked so that every update on the live systems was immediately mirrored at the other site.

You and your sister have to decide what you want from your backup strategy, which is where someone with expertise in the field, but someone divorced from the day-to-day mechanics of it, with no product to sell you other than knowledge, can help.

Do you want a once-per-day, so that you can restore to the end of the previous day's work? Or instantaneous, such that you can pick up exactly where you left off when failure occurred? What other premises are available for physical backups? Has the business got more than one site? etc etc

ChuckMountain

that wrote: »

How much in £ is triple the price? It still could be cheap!

Yep agree with you on that that . Without knowing what they are paying and what they are getting for it is hard to say if it is good value for money.

Does the backup service have a regular test, or have they proved it works. What you don't want to do is come to the time when you need a restore only for it no to work. Something if you do it yourself you need to cover too.

You know (or should know) the risk and associated cost to the business if your IT goes down\gets stolen etc., does the company have a service level agreement to get you back up and running in x hours\x days etc.

Incidentally that £600 per seat figures seems high for what I would expect at that volume of PC level but I guess it depends how you have calculated it.

that

googler wrote: »

OP, as an aside, many years back I was in the IT dept of a large financial co.

At first, backup was a daily operation of shuttling large IBM magnetic tapes between data centre and offsite storage. Then it became smaller tapes, and data cartridges, and eventually reached the point where the co had a mirror of the main data centre (same CPU, same disk drives, etc), with the mirror linked so that every update on the live systems was immediately mirrored at the other site.

You and your sister have to decide what you want from your backup strategy, which is where someone with expertise in the field, but someone divorced from the day-to-day mechanics of it, with no product to sell you other than knowledge, can help.

Do you want a once-per-day, so that you can restore to the end of the previous day's work? Or instantaneous, such that you can pick up exactly where you left off when failure occurred? What other premises are available for physical backups? Has the business got more than one site? etc etc

Unfortunately this may not be good enough these days. If the files are small and plentiful, an encryption virus can take days to trundle through a volume. if you have only one or two daily backups and rotate them, they will always be encrypted files.

If the encryption virus finds an open share with backups on your san, or open virtual tape library, you are more than in the brown smelly stuff, and you will either pay or loose it all.

If your company has a quarterly billing process and that file is only used every quarter, if it goes faulty, or gets deleted by a disenfranchised employee you loose up to 6 months work, providing you have monthly copies going back a year, if you only have a months rotation, the file will possibly no longer exist and it is lost for ever.

ChuckMountain, we cover multiple sites - think 70?, citrix farm, windows, unix and linux. Have about 700 applications we support, about 400t data and an expensive backup solution

ChuckMountain

Can't quote on this device but see where you are coming from that, as normally application support and other things would for me would have been in a different bucket as opposed where I was thinking in terms of pure desktop support if that makes sense.

It's important for the op to ensure when comparing providers that's is apples and apples in terms of pricing.

Heedtheadvice

Aubray,
Loads of excellent pointers being made on this thread.
A few thoughts.....

Backup ....and business continuity really in it's wider sense .... includes data protection, disaster recovery, security etc....and more.

Your sister ought to be in the best place to put values on that for loss of business (lost from the computer system) cost of duplicating work (and risk of not getting that right), reputational risk or time delays resulting in worst case of lost customers, loss of data you are legally obliged to keep (lots here such as records for HMRC, pensions, employee records, maybe those that are needed to show compliance etc.).

Then there could be risk that your contract with the third party tech company is not fulfilled (one cause already mentioned -their error, you lack of a complete contract, the company folding....)

Now given sufficient detail of needs and acsoec their are 'experts' who post on this site who can give great technical advice such as those earlier in this thread. However, and I do not disagree with much that has been written above, it seems probable that you need a business risk assessment to then be able to specify your need. You can then take it from there balancing cost with likelyhood of risks materialising and impact of those risks. I would suggest a review by a Business Analyst who also has experience in IT issues.

Athough your sister is focussing on 'computer data', that could just be current blinkered vision, a review could be an eye opener that she has other significant risks of equal (or greater?) importance.

As mentioned already by a previous poster that is a legitimate business expense eventually paid for by your customers as part of your overheads but tax deductable.

......but yes there are several backup regimes as well as other security measures a business should take. That's post gives an idea of what might be appropriate. Good that your sister has an eye open on the issues and is not living in naive bliss of 'buy a few pcs and life will be easier and I need do nothing'.....oooops too late.

Let's hope this thread has given much food for thought and helps you help her.