Your business data is one of your most valuable assets. But what happens if disaster strikes, whether from a cyberattack or a natural event? Let’s explore why backups are essential and why your business should rely on a Full system image backup solution to secure your systems and data.
Full System Image Backup vs. File-Based Backup
The key difference between file-based backups and a full system image backup lies in what is being backed up. File-based backups of data focus on individual files, such as Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and QuickBooks files, similar to what you experience with Carbonite or other cloud backup services. These services back up your data files but not the entire system.
How are full system image backup 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; a full system image 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 full system image backup and restore to your server and workstations even though the hardware is completely different.
Turning days into hours
What a full system image 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 IT Services
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 Full system image backup. 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.
