Your business information is a key asset. No doubt you take great care to protect your stock from illegal access. The same careful approach needs to be taken to protect your investment in knowledge and information. Consider all the information about your clients, suppliers, marketing and sales efforts etc. How would your business operate if your information vanished in a blink of an eye, or if it fell into the wrong hands ?

What will happen if a virus enters your network and infects all your Word documents beyond repair ? What will happen if a hard drive on your file server fails beyond repair ? What if one of your employees maliciously starts deleting or corrupting files on your network ? What if you find that your tape backup is not working correctly ? Most organisations have a false sense of security with their tape backups. Usually, problems with tape backups only comes to light when a major system failure occurs.

Do you have adequate policies and methods to ensure your data survives unpredictable events such as these? Are you sure that all your information and emails are being backed up ? Or is some information located on laptops or PCs which miss out on backup procedures ? Can you guarantee that your backups work correctly every night ?

Familiarity breeds contempt: Many businesses do not appreciate the value of backups until they experience catastrophic failures such as a fire, flood, hackers, etc. Protect your business. Contact Communicat to discuss our automated backups and proactive safety checks will help you sleep at night.

Your backup method should follow something like this schedule:

Backup Period	Number of tapes required	Performed	Overwritten every
Nightly	4	Monday to Thursday	Week
Weekly	4	Friday	Month
Quarterly	4	End of each quarter	Never
End of Year	1	End of year	Never
End of Financial Year	1	End of financial year	Never

We recommend the Veritas Backup Exec line of backup software (recently acquired by Symantec). More information about this software package can be found at: Backup Exec Website

If you would like more information about our recommended backup cycles please call Communicat. We have a booklet and tape labels which can help you to achieve a safer backup method.