Following on from the last post, here is a little more detail.

There are many computer backup solutions available; the one we use at Flint IT is Storage Craft’s Shadow Protect program which we believe ticks all the boxes. The main benefits of Shadow Protect are:

• High quality and extensive database backups which can quickly and easily be transferred onto a new server if your server should fail. Most companies cannot do this currently as Windows server backup will not restore to different hardware
• Easy to install server backup on all your PCs at once and monitor all backup operations from one central computer
• Fast and reliable recovery of your operating systems, applications, configuration and personal settings and data
• Ability to get your servers back online quickly, and your data restored within minutes with minimum downtime and maximum business continuity
• Backed up information is consolidated minimising the disk space required for computer backups
• Database backup images can be replicated to separate media giving you both onsite and offsite copies of your backup
• Near real-time computer backups as often as every 15 minutes are possible.

We believe that investing in Storage Craft backup could guarantee business continuity in the long term, protecting you from disaster and safeguarding the future of your company. For more details or if you have any questions contact us at sales AT flint-it DOT com or call 0845 3309680

Give Flint IT a call and let our cutting-edge backup and disaster recovery service give you peace of mind

Although backup broadband is essential to safeguard your internet access, a thorough disaster recovery plan must also ensure that you are prepared for a server failure. Your server may be out of sight and out of mind most of the time but could you afford for it to go down? Are you confident that you know the answers to the questions below? If not it may be time to think about improving your disaster recovery plan.

1. How frequent are your computer backups?
2. Is your full system backed up, enabling you to recover to a new server if the old one fails?
3. Do you have an offsite database backup which will enable you to recover if your server is lost to fire, flood or theft?
4. A backup is only useful if you know that you can restore from it; when did you last try to recover data from your existing computer backup?
5. Did you know that 50% of tapes fail? When did you last run a computer backup test?
6. How long does it take to recover from computer backup? Could your business cope with this amount of downtime?

Unless you already have daily monitoring of your backup systems it is likely that you will not feel entirely confident in the answers to all these questions. If this is the case have a look at our blog post explaining how to use Storage Craft’s Shadow Protect, or contact us at sales AT flint-it DOT com or call 0845 3309680 for more information.

Looking for IT backup in the Hertfordshire area? Give Flint IT a call.

Sage is a piece of computer software which allows small businesses to do a variety of finance tasks all in one place. Your company may use it for salaries and bookkeeping or you may use Act – which is also owned by Sage – to do CRM or SageHR. Many of the companies we interact with on a day to day basis rely heavily on Sage software for a large proportion of their finance and sales tasks.

We are well aware of how vital Sage software is; as well as being essential to your business workings, the information you produce using Sage is likely to be extremely sensitive and confidential. Because of the importance of this software we want to let you in on some useful information which could save your business from major downtime in the event of a disaster.

As well as general backup which you should have in your office, Sage comes with its own unique backup system built in. This is a clever piece of software but it does not quite have the capabilities to backup automatically so you need to make sure you do it, preferably on a monthly basis.

This is easy to forget but is so important; it might be worth setting reminders for yourself on Outlook or an alternate program to make sure you never forget to do your backups.

It may be tempting to back up Sage data and store the backups on your desktop, on a disk or USB device or in a folder on your PC. Whilst this is better than nothing, it is far from a fool-proof solution. If your PC crashes or is damaged all is lost, and disks and USB devices are easy to damage or lose.

A better thing to do is to save backups on your server, which should also have its own backup and disaster recovery plan in place. In this way, your vital business data is doubly backed up and highly unlikely to be lost, corrupted or hacked. 

Keep an eye on upcoming blog posts to read a story about how one of our customers dealt with accidentally deleting Sage from the server.

Contact Flint IT today for disaster recovery in Luton, Milton Keynes, Harpenden and St. Albans