disaster recovery and business continuity

Backup is vital. Disk space being cheap, we backup to a network hard drive overnight, and then copy to removable media during the day for subsequent off-site storage.

For small business you need to backup shared files, database data and email data. Depending on the system, database and email stores may be simple disk files or more likely SQL server and Exchange databases, in the latter case you need either a backup agent or a utility to overnight extract data to simple disk files.

Business continuity is often more important that disaster recovery. You need to access emails and process orders before a new server can be sourced and configured. Not a problem as long as you have made a plan.

Do you need server hardware on standby to cope with a failure ?, 9 times out of 10 backup is used to recover a file which has been inadvertently deleted. Do you need a backup route for internet access ?, is this across the same BT wires as your primary connection ?.

These and many other issues need to be considered in context, again it is not really a problem as long as you have a plan.