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Interactive Media Consulting, LLC has assembled a team of professionals ready to help you with any project. On staff, in our Saratoga Springs office, you will find designers, programmers, front-end developers, and customer support representatives. All projects are handled in-house, with minimal outsourcing and no off-shoring.

It’s All about the Backup

A scary thing happened last week. Our office sits right next door to City Hall in Saratoga Springs. City Hall was struck by lightning, causing a small fire and a lot of water damage.  As with the way social media goes, all I saw was “CITY HALL IS ON FIRE!”.  While I hoped no one was hurt, I immediately started to panic about our office and what might be happening here–both are old buildings and there is very little clearance between our building and City Hall. After a message from someone who decided to check out the scene said our building was fine, I relaxed, but redesigned our backup procedure.

Previous Procedures

We already had two backup procedures in place. For our web servers (not physically located in our office), there is an automated procedure that backs data up on the server and sends a copy to a password-protected Amazon S3 account. We store one day on the server and 30 days at Amazon. We periodically check to make sure everything is transferring as it should, and generally don’t think about it. That’s a good thing. This procedure does not need to change.

Our internal server and accounting information are already setup for automated backups to an external hard drive three times per week. The problem — they are all in our office. 

So what’s the problem? All the internal files stayed in our office. 

New Procedures

A new external hard drive and travel case are on the way. We will be swapping it out with the current one every week and it will physically leave the office.  We will also be exploring putting this data on Amazon S3 as well.  As for all the archived/never used/clients who are no longer our clients data? I think a fireproof safe is fine for that.

Most data we have can easily be reproduced. However, after 22+ years in business, we find that sometimes we are the ones with data a client needs and cannot find anywhere. We are somewhat of a data packrat and it has come in handy a number of times. It is important to us to make sure that we are able to retrieve anything our clients may need.

What is your back up procedure?