Random Thoughts
Well I had this huge post I was going to put, but then I got stupid and compiled a program that locked up everything and screwed me up. Sooo, I will try to be succinct: offer a monthly maintenance program for disaster recovery. You need to decide the level of support you are going to give: whether you will be onsite, remotely, or through a service – with fees for coming in more than once a month for a recovery on top of a monthly maintenance fee. (Ok short and sweet is dead) It is funny you bring this up, I was just going over in my mind how to present Backup options to a client recently and was researching the different methods from disk imaging to a drive to using tape travans. There are many options to choose from and I’ve been thinking that the idea of a back up for a disaster plan needs to be broken down in Archive, Active Back up, and Complete Backup. Archive is data while viable, is not necessarily needed to be back-upped on a daily basis. Active Back-up is data that is changing all the time, and needs to be updated daily (this leads to another thought about document versioning control and the uses of repository control systems – but that is far in another realm), while Complete back up would be a weekly or whatever period would be appropriate, for a total image of the drive. You could offer a sliding scale of what you could offer, it would also give you an opportunity to help your client to organize their items as well. So let me give an example, offer to set up a NAS on the network that is the Archive of all the documents, have a daily back up (using whatever) of the “my Documents” folder of any files that changed that day. Each week do an image of their system (or systems). Each month, image the archive. While I give these ideas I don’t propose that these are best practices, just examples of what you could do or offer. I need to think on it more to figure out a best practice process.
later
