Although most companies consistently back up their data, it’s actually fairly rare for companies to test the integrity of their backups to see if they have been backing up properly.
That’s why managed backups are often better, since a high-quality managed backup provider will usually have some sort of internal monitoring and testing protocol in place to ensure that their clients will be able to recover if they ever need to.
People and businesses that manage their own backups simply do not have time to constantly test their backups for consistency. Instead, they just perform their backups and pray that those backups will be recoverable when the time comes.
One particular example involved a customer who had been performing their own in-house backups on an IBM iSeries server that hosted important business-critical applications. When it came time to perform an emergency recovery on their server, they were unable to recover a large number of database transactions. These lost transactions ended up costing the company a significant amount of money. Their “cheap” in-house backup process ended up costing more than a professionally managed iSeries online backup service.
Another common example is with companies that lose documents or files from common incidents like accidental deletion or file corruption. For small incidents like this, tape backups are often too inconvenient to recover. It’s simply easier for IT to ask employees to re-create their work from scratch. These small incidents add up over time, and the lost productivity can become very costly.
And of course, we’ve also had numerous clients approach us after major critical data loss incidents, in which significant amounts of data were permanently lost. These incidents are very costly, and can often result in the business closing its doors.
To hear more about worst-case data loss disaster scenarios, watch this video.