Introduction
Nothing is more important to your business than protecting your data. But what would happen if you had to get your entire network back up and running after a failed server? And what about a real disaster at your business that rendered your entire site unusable? Let’s take a quick look at all of these components of a successful backup strategy, explain some important concepts such as RPO and RTO and see how they all come together in Total Data Protection™.

Backup Classic
This is the “classic” backup that most companies are performing today. Whether you copy your data to disc, have automated backup to tape or a combination of the two, this is only part of the equation. The next step is getting a snapshot of your servers’ configuration. This is a complete “state” backup that includes all the information that makes your site unique (software, users, shares, permissions, etc.). Without this type of backup, recovery from a lost or failed server is days or weeks, not hours away. How well could you withstand a week of total downtime? And keep in mind that you are not just protecting against natural disasters here; something as simple as one bad patch out of the hundreds your server does every year can cause this.

Business Continuity
Let’s talk about RPO and RTO. You can think of Recovery Point Objective as the rearview mirror; that is, how much data you can afford to lose between backups. For example, if you backup to tape nightly, you have a data RPO of an entire day’s work. If you backup hourly, you can have an RPO of just one hour. Similarly, you can think of Recovery Time Objective (RTO) as the view through the windshield, or the amount of time it takes to get up and running after a total loss. With traditional backups, you measure RTO in weeks (order server, install, configure your network, restore your data). With Total Data Protection you can measure that time in minutes or at worst, hours. Again, which sounds better; downtime measured in hours or days?

Disaster Recovery
Disasters come in many guises. Some are as simple as an employee opening that email that happens to contain the newest variant of Cryptolocker, and suddenly you’ve lost access to every file. Some are weather extremes. Or you’ve had a thorough theft leaving you without copper in the walls, not to mention the server and backup discs. In our 20 years we have seen each of these scenarios. But “day-to-day” or major disasters can befall any business. At the very least, you’ll get to know just what your RPO and your RTO really mean, and just what downtime really costs, assuming you really have everything replicated off-site. And if you don’t have data off-site, what would the loss of your AR, your drawings, your database, mean to your business?

Total Data Protection™
What if you could create a local backup every hour, with months of rollback? What if you could access standby servers to fail over to within minutes? What if you could copy your data off-site so you had true disaster recovery capability from up-to-date replicas of your server(s) and data, all in the Cloud? And what if this were all completely automated and tested? That is what Total Data Protection™ does for your business. Because, backup doesn’t matter . . . recovery does.