Does Your Paycheck Disappear When Your Data Does?

The nightly news keeps telling us that the economy is getting worse and that people are losing their jobs, paychecks disappearing. Most of those people have little or no control over that, but do you?

Is there a computer system out there that, if it went down, your paycheck would go down with it?

Day after day I see businesses furiously stuffing data into a computer system, cranking out widgets or whatevers and pulling payroll out of it.

Once in while, though, everything grinds to a halt. Some poor schlep gets hauled out of his cubicle and told to "restore some data". Restore from what? Those dusty tapes sitting on the counter that sometimes get inserted and sometimes don't? How old are they?

Perhaps the key question is: What happens if you can't restore the data? What if it's gone? Does that affect the very ability of the business to write your paycheck?

Most small businesses, and some not so small, rarely give that a thought.

Let's look at a couple of real life examples.

Backup tapes can be expensive. Ever since we outgrew the 4mm DAT tapes that can be had for a little over $10 each for a 36/72GB tape, we are back to paying prices of $30 to $35 per tape. At these prices, few customers want to buy 30 or so tapes.

So when a customer says that they want data from two weeks ago, but only has 5 backup tapes, what do you say? Further, they tell you they need the data on a Tuesday with the comment "I was going to mention it last Thursday when you were here, but I forgot". In those subsequent days, 3 of their 5 backup tapes have been over written.

Another client had only 5 tapes, which I identified for them as a problem. They agreed to buy 5 more, which I acquired for them and delivered to the person in charge of the backup.

A couple of weeks later I saw those tapes still in their shrinkwrap in the drawer. When I asked her about it she said she didn't know she was supposed to actually start using them. Huh? I didn't realize I had to spell it out.

Sometimes the lack of a good backup can be a training issue. A client's software vendor created an icon that created a backup file - on the desktop. The batch file created some text in a window that explained one must now move that file to a tape or CD - if anyone read it.

So for almost two years they were (occasionally) changing tapes that never had one byte of data written to them.

As you can see, people expect data to always miraculouly be there. But when it isn't, it can be very costly, even fatal, to a business and potentially your paycheck.

Every backup plan should be regularly tested with a data restore.

The paycheck you save just might be yours.

Learn more about computer backup here and at the websites listed in the resource area.