Business Continuity Strategy

This page documents all of the procedures and processes we have in place that can be used to ensure that your business can survive a disaster, at least from an IT perspective.

Data Backups

Forget About IT Ltd currently has three backup servers in two separate locations. Every night, at approximately 10pm, our servers start to copy all the changes that have happened to your data since the previous backup. Should this backup be interrupted, it will automatically try again after a short period of time, for a number of attempts. The process is repeated for at least one other out of the three backup servers, so that your data is backup up onto at least two backup servers.

Once the backup has finished, the backup servers take a copy and date it. The daily backups are kept for a week. One backup a week is used as the weekly backup, and is kept for a month, and one backup a month is kept for a year. So at the end of a full year's rotation, we will have, on at least two different servers, at least 20 snapshots of your data (6 x daily, 4 or 5 x weekly, 12 x monthly).

Mission Critical data

Because we charge for the amount of data we store for you at our data centres, it is the client's choice as to what they consider to be mission critical data. However, unless a client specified otherwise, we back up all the data on the server.

Archive data

As all business accumulate data, eventually there comes a time when it needs to be archived off. We can provide areas on the server that are not backed up to our off-site storage, but in order to make sure the data is safe, we recommend that the client purchases a couple of external hard drives, which the backup program will use to carry out a local backup of that archive area. The client then swaps those drives on a weekly basis, taking the other off site somewhere, like their home.

Large Files

Because it is possible for files to be too large to be uploaded overnight, files over 1GB in size are only backed up at the weekend, when we can leave the backups running long enough to complete the task before the next backup is due.

Files over 10GB are not currently backed up remotely for the same reasons. However, our backup program logs what files it has not backed up, so it is very easy for us to determine if there are files on your server not being backed up due to their size.

As upload bandwidth improves over time, we review these sizes on a regular basis.

Bandwidth

we normally limit the amount of upload bandwidth we use on a client's broadband to 25% of its capacity. At the weekend we increase this to 50%. This means that when the backup program is running, it does not impact the the normal traffic to and from the Internet.