It’s the simple things we so often forget. You push them to the back of your mind, safe in the knowledge that it’ll be alright and most of the time it is…whatever ‘it’ happens to be.

And it’s the same for IT backups. Most of the time, the system or process you’ve got in place works as it should. It just ticks along doing its thing.

 

But when you forget to check your backups and something does go wrong, the train can quickly come off the rails.

We’ve seen more than our fair share of backup disasters. One such example was a client that managed their own back up process. All ran as it should until ‘someone’ accidentally changed some settings and the changes weren’t picked up on for more than half a year.

The first we heard about it was a frantic call from the IT Manager exclaiming that their ERP system had crashed and the backups hadn’t worked for months.
Now to lose a few files is one thing, but this company had just lost everything connected to the day to day running of their business. They had no idea what they were due to manufacture, what orders had been shipped, what was outstanding, who had paid, who they owed money to. They were essentially blind.

Four days and a lot of heartache later, we managed to retrieve the most recent data from the ERP system and get the company running again. The Financial Director later confessed that one more day without their system and they would have gone bust, such was their reliance on IT and access to information.

We all know how important it is to back up, and we all have processes in place to do the job, but checking it works day-in, day-out is two minutes well spent. Trust us, the alternative is not worth thinking about.