Fire-damaged RAID Recovery and Offsite Backup

This week, we want to share a case study from our archives that demonstrates both our capabilities with RAID recovery and how having an offsite backup can be vital to maintaining business continuity in case of an emergency.

In this situation, a small business suffered an office fire, ruining both their RAID-5 server and the external hard drives they used to backup their day-to-day files.

Despite their best efforts to keep the externals offsite, they forgot to take them home the weekend of the fire. Fortunately, Gillware was able to recover all the data from their servers.

This scenario demonstrates the need for a file-based cloud backup to keep important data safe from data loss threats such as hardware failure, theft, fires, floods or natural disasters such as tornadoes or hurricanes. They did have their critical data backed up to a cloud-based service, which saved them a decent amount of trouble. However, having only their critical data in the cloud left them without useful day-to-day data and emails collected over a ten year period, until insurance provided us with the drives months later.

Having external hard drives to backup data is a useful and cost effective solution, however this scenario demonstrates the problems that arise when your backup solution relies on human action to be effective and safe.

Gillware recommends most businesses should implement an automatic, off-site solution to prevent harmful situations such as this one. For anyone seeking backup, Gillware Data Solutions offers automatic, cost-effective, and configurable backup solutions that run on a set schedule of your choice.