Photo Credit: kostiszaxaris1 via Compfight cc

Where are your backups?

Answer this for yourself right now. Go-on, this website will still be here. You know where they are? Good. Answer these other questions for yourself:

• Where are your backups?
  • In the office, in the cloud, at a remote site? All three?
• What are you backing up?
  • Business Documents?
  • QuickBooks?
  • Fishbowl?
  • Other databases?
  • Microsoft Active Directory?
• What frequency?
  • Daily, Weekly, Monthly?
• What is your retention?
  • A week, a month, a quarter, etc ?
  • or # of Backups?
• How quickly can you access these backups?
  • Within the hour, or within the day?
• Who do you need to contact to access the backups?
  • Your gamer nephew?
  • Your Managed Service Provider?
  • Your neighbor?
• How granular can you restore files/data?
  • Entire backup?
  • Specific files?
  • Entire Virtual Machine?
• Do you have the software to open the files once restored?
  • Is that under hardware locked-license?
  • Do you have the license keys?
  • Do you have the installers?
• Do you have sufficient hardware to restore the data to?
  • No, your 10 year old server is not sufficient to run your 50-user filesharing/fishbowl/quickbooks.

So a week before my trip to Australia included some of these questions with a customer.  QuickBooks decided to crash with a Duplicate Name error, of which the QuickBooks Enterprise Team blamed the Virtual Machine for causing it/the reason for not supporting the installation.

After a few hours of coordinating with Accounting, the Managed Service Provider, we were able to restore service. I would say, dont call us for QuickBooks support; that is not what we are about.  However in a very expensive pinch, we might be able to figure something out.

Enjoy the week, it is a hot one here in Southern California.