Adventures in Accounting: Where are your backups?

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 number 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 and used it as the reason for not supporting the installation.

After a few hours of coordinating with Accounting and the Managed Service Provider, we were able to restore service. I would say, don’t 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.