The variety of backup solution which are available is quite amazing, from SQL database replication to mirror images of entire Hard Disk Drives – almost any kind of backup can be made.
One thing that all these backup solutions have in common, is a highly favorable cost-to-benefit ratio. This means it costs very little to make backups, where having a working backup is a great benefit to the sustainability of a business.
Not having suitable backups in place often leads to a number of expenses to recover a business to operational efficiency. These may include
- labor cost, in addition to the normal salaries, over-time or additional specialized personnel to re-capture or re-process lost data;
- specialist IT staff to recover the lost data;
- specialist hardware recovery skills or techniques
This does not include opportunity cost while the systems are down, or the embarrassment value of having to admit “we have no backups…”
Comparing Costs
A typical basic backup solution for simple file copy&paste backups is the external hard disk drive.
A 1TB external HDD sells for approximately $100.
If lightning strikes the source data and a HDD drive has to be recovered, quotes typically start at over $1000.
Backup Cost to Recovery Cost ratio in this example works out to 1:10 – it is ten times more expensive to recover data from a HDD with no backup, than to buy the external HDD and make a backup.
This example is for illustrative purposes only. It is not suggested that a file copy to an external hard drive is a suitable backup solution for any specific data type. Costs for the recovery of certain data types in this scenario can be higher.
Ask yourself this question: “Can we afford not to have a backup in place?”