December 2006  Chester, Virginia

    Fire destroyed several offices and heavily damaged another in a small business park just off Route 10 near the old town section of Chester. The building which housed around six offices was a total loss along with the businesses within them. Fortunately no one was hurt in the fire and its cause is still unknown to this day. Businesses that carried insurance were fortunate enough to recover the loss of their investments, but what about the data? Electronic data is the foundation of businesses small and large and is just as important as its employees. So what happens when fire destroys every single device that housed the megabytes of data that helped run the business to begin with?

    For the clients of Network Business Solutions, a computer network provider housed in this particular complex, this was an important question. Several clients had websites and email hosted at this site along with important tidbits of data such as usernames/passwords and locations of data housed in other locations across the Internet and now it was ash. Well the answer to this situation was the number 2. Two of everything data wise, or essentially back ups of all relevant data.  Chris Faris the Chief Technical Officer and part owner of NBS was adamant about keeping backup copies of client data offsite. In many cases it was kept on a server in his own home. 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 that were scheduled to move to a new host in the coming months was transfered to the new host by the next afternoon with help of the professional staff of that host.

    While the owners and staff of NBS have moved on to bigger and better things the moral of this horrible situation needs to be burned into memory (Multiple puns). Backups are as important as the data itself, whether it be a crashed hard drive. corrupted document or the complete destruction of ones office. In order to recover from these situations businesses and even individuals in general 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. Knowing that all they have to do is carry the small drive out of the office in a pocket book or glove box can give a large sense of relief that if disaster struck, recovery is not far off.”

   

     For more on the many different types of back up solutions available contact us at Faris Consulting Group.