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Protect Against Computer Viruses

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An easy way to losing your data is to neglect to install a firewall and anti-virus software.  Computer viruses rangefrom the annoying to those that threaten not only the systems of your organization but your organization’s reputation as well. The easiest way to lose your data with respect to computer viruses is to not install a firewall and anti-virus software. Anther way to insure 100% infection when a virus occurs is to make sure that all of your systems operate using Windows – not just your PCs but your servers and your backup servers as well.

Other Options

In order to protect your data you will of course have a firewall and install anti-virus software. From a backup perspective, the important thing here is to operate your backup and disaster recovery software on a non-Windows platform.

Vendors ship their backup software on Windows platforms for one reason – they can make the most money with the least expense because Windows is so ubiquitous. If you take a step back and think about it, however, it just doesn’t make sense to run your “protection” software on the same operating system that is relentlessly under attack by malicious people.

For help to protect against data loss, contact NPV.

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Disregarding Software Corruption Leads you to Lose Data

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Shortcut to Losing Your Data

Software corruption is the third leading cause of data loss. Anyone who has lived through a BSoD (Blue Screen of Death) in Windows understands the concept. Of course, software corruption is caused not only by software defects but through the chaining of errors in systems as well. It’s important to ignore software corruption in order to increase your odds of losing your data.

Taking Another Path

Software corruption, like human error, is another type of logical (as opposed to physical, or hardware) failure. The primary differentiation with respect to data loss is that software corruption can occur and remain undetected for days, weeks, months, or years. Thus automation for strict adherence to policy and retention are incredibly important techniques for protecting your data against software corruption.

If you are experiencing software corruption, contact NPV.com.

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Hardware Failure: The Right Way to Backup Your System

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Hardware failure is the leading cause of data loss; so ignoring hardware failure is the fastest shortcut to losing data. Because you don’t want to lose your data, do not ignore the hardware failure and backup your systems and data.

If you use tape as your backup medium, you could also lose your data. With the high failure rates associated with tape, sooner or later you’re assured that you’re going to need to recover your data and not be able to do so.

SAN or NAS storage devices as the source of the backup and the target of a backup is another highly probable way to losing data. We are not referring to snapshots in between physical transfers of data off the SAN or NAS; we are talking about using your SAN and NAS for primary storage and for backup storage exclusively.

What to do instead

To protect yourself from hardware failure, you have to move your data from primary storage to a completely separate secondary storage. That secondary storage can and should be less expensive than your primary storage, but it has to have RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability) characteristics that are as good or better than your primary storage.

Those requirements rule out tape as well as ruling out partitioned primary storage (SAN or NAS) – although SAN and NAS snapshotting may be used between primary backup protection. The best approach is some type of D2D (Disk-to-Disk) backup. The advantage to D2D backup is that you are using secondary media with higher reliability characteristics than tape while still insuring that you have a physically separate secondary storage set so that you can survive hardware and system failure.

For help with Hardware Failure, contact NPV.com

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