Data Backup: Why your Business needs Image-Based Backups
Your business’s data is one of your most valuable assets. But what will happen in the event of a disaster, whether it’s a hacker or a natural disaster? We’re going to discuss with you the importance of your backup and why your business needs image-based backups.
Image-Based Backups vs. File-Based Backups
The difference between file-based backups and image-based backups is what is being backed up. File-based backups of data is what you would experience with carbonite or another type of cloud backup service. They simply backup your data, (e.g., Word document, Excel spreadsheets, and QuickBooks files).
How are Image-Based Backups Different?
Your data is extremely important, it is paramount to everything in your business. However, simply restoring your data is not getting you to a point to where you recover from a disaster quickly and seamlessly, eliminating the impact on your business.
This is the primary distinction between the two; an image-based backup is basically a snapshot of your entire system. What this means is that not only do you get your data files, but you also backup your operating system, programs, and your application settings. It creates a direct replica of your hard drive and puts it into what we call an image file.
The image file can be transferred and restored to dissimilar hardware. What that means is, let’s say you had a worst-case scenario and your office suffered from a disaster and you lost all your equipment and data. With image-based backups, you will be able to replace all of your computers with any brand you like. If you had a Dell or HP, but Lenovo’s were available immediately, we can take your image-based backup and restore to your server and workstations even though the hardware is completely different.
Turning days into hours
What an image-based backup is going to let us do is turn your recovery time from days into hours and minutes. We can literally recover a workstation in less than 30 minutes. We can recover a server within a few hours depending on how much data is involved.
Just think about when you get a new cell phone. You typically spend quite a bit of time adding all your applications and changing all your settings. This takes time, now imagine this happening to every computer in your business.
In the event of a disaster, the time it takes to get your business back up and operational is crucial. With image-based backups, you’re back in business as if nothing ever happened which is paramount to your ability to do business and service your customers.
FEMA studies show that 40% of small businesses never reopen after a disaster. This number is alarming and why it is imperative that small businesses have a plan in place. We don’t want your business to be a statistic.
You don’t want your customers to lose patience and take their business elsewhere because you are out of commission for several days, instead of hours. This type of loss would be unacceptable and is why your business must have image-based backups.
Our Managed Care Service
If you are a 24×7 Protect IT, Inc. managed service customer, we’re monitoring your computer’s life 24/7. We monitor your backups and even know when there’s an issue. For instance, if you are getting close to running out of storage space, or there’s a fluke that happens that causes the backups to fail. We will catch this right away and remedy it, so your backups continue.
We also do verification of the image-based backups. This verification is important because you don’t want to find out when you have a disaster that your backups were no good. You want to find this out when you have a chance to recover and create new backups to make sure that your backups are there and valid when you need them.
This is what you get when 24×7 Protect IT, Inc. is monitoring and maintaining your IT infrastructure. We make sure that your business and its operations are going to be okay no matter what happens.