In late December 2006 a structure fire destroyed a whole row of offices in a small business park near the old town section of Chester Virginia. The fire started in the main office for a security company and according to the owner of the property it possibly started by a lit cigarette or space heater. Fortunately no one was hurt, but sadly the security business, where the fire started, was the only business not properly insured. Businesses that did carry insurance were fortunate enough to recover the loss of their investments, but what about the data? Electronic data is the foundation of businesses small, medium or large, so what happens when fire destroys every single device that housed the gigabytes of data that helped run that business to begin with?

    For the clients of Network Business Solutions, an IT provider housed in this particular complex, this was an important question. Several clients had websites, email and archives of electronic data hosted at this location. Now it was all gone. Fortunately Chris Faris, Chief Technical Officer and part owner of NBS, was adamant about keeping backup copies of client data offsite. The primary goal was to have the same data offsite in case disaster struck and at the end 2006 it did. By the end of that morning, with embers of what was left of their office still smoldering, temporary servers were utilized to bring websites back online and email services were transfered to a new host and up and running by the next afternoon.

    While the owners and staff of NBS have moved on to bigger and better things the moral of this horrible situation stays the same. Always keep two or more copies of everything and have at least one copy offsite. Backups are as important as the data itself, whether it be a crashed hard drive, corrupted document, power issue or the complete destruction of a companies office. In order to recover from these situations businesses and even individuals must back up their electronic data. “ I’ve literately held whole businesses in the palm of my hand using a USB drive that contained all the financial and relevant data of a business system that I had just backed up.” said Chris Faris “To see the look on the face of a business owner when they realize that a $29 thumb drive contains everything they’ve worked hard for and built over the years, is interesting to say the least.”

   

     Chris Faris is now running Faris Consulting and continues to provide IT services to SMB companies all over the Central Virginia region and is a reseller for Mozy Pro. Mozy Pro is the professional online backup service used by companies worldwide.