Case Studies

Software Development Company Finds Their Backup Tapes for the Last 6 Years are Worthless - Cost TOO Much to Think About

The following is a story, as told by the staff IT support person, regarding the blind faith of an unmanaged backup solution. Listen to his story:

“I had the vice president of sales come into my office one day, he had been on a sales trip and had his laptop stolen in the airport. He says not to worry, all of his documents and everything on the machine was backed up on the server. While going through the server, he noticed that some of his older things were missing as he had done a cleanup a month or so back. “Not to worry” he stated again, “we backup everything to tape every night”. I brought in a stack of tapes from the last 2 months and start looking through the backup software at the backup sets for what I need. I find a suitable set about 2 ½ months out and set it up for restoring. I pop in the tape it asked for and get an error “specified files for restore not found”. Thinking maybe I got a bad tape, I select another restore point with similar data and pop in the tape and get the same error. Then things go from bad to worse. Rather than look for another restore point to try, I decided to look at the tapes instead to get a better idea how the backups were working. Well, even though the backup sets in the software were showing what was to be backed up, all of the tapes were blank. Apparently, the person who was doing the backups for ALMOST 6 years had never formatted or initialized the tapes.”

Case in point, an unmanaged backup and disaster recovery plan is as good as no plan at all.

Failed Hard Drives Costs Insurance Company $30,000 and 5 Days of Downtime

A 25 person insurance company had multiple hard drive failure causing all data to be lost. When they contacted us to recover the data from the system backups they had put in place, we found they weren’t functioning properly and in fact they had not backup data. In the end, recovering the data off of these failed drives took a team of disaster recovery specialists 5 days and $30,000.

Had we been monitoring their network and performing regular maintenance, we would have been able to detect that these hard drives were failing, that the backups were not performing properly, and we could have prevented the crash, the downtime, and the $30,000 in costs to get them back up and running, not to mention the 5 days their network was down and revenue loss from employee downtime. $6 Million Dollar per Year Construction Company Avoids Loss of 10 Years of Accounting Data Using MnK’s Total Care solution

A local construction company was doing a pretty routine update to their accounting software (QuickBooks Enterprise Edition) when disaster almost struck.

Let us share the Comptroller’s exact words:

“All was fine until I needed to install an update to QuickBooks Enterprise Edition a few weeks ago. I started the process at about 6 PM when everyone was gone from the office. I was thinking it would take me about 4 hours or so to update the program on my 12 terminals and the database on my server. The database contains ALL of my Financial records for the past 10 years. I have other back-ups from previous years, and usually do so after the year closes. I had not gotten to 2OO7 yet. When I went to install the update for the database, the program SAID it did a back-up of my file. I proceeded to then run the update. Midway through the update, there was a glitch in the process and the program told me to reinstall my back-up and to try the update again. I thought” sure, no problem.” That was until I went to get the back-up I THOUGHT the program had made. To my shock and horror, the back-up was not there. It took a moment or two for it to sink in that I had lost ALL of my data including everything for 2007. Gone. Completely. We are a $6 million per year business and this is a LOT of data. I was sick to my stomach.

I then remembered about the plan we had put into place and I anxiously called you. My heart was in my throat as the phone was ringing. I reached you on a business trip at 11pm. You told me all would be fine since the back-up device you installed does a back-up every 15 minutes going back at least a month. I was relieved, yet somewhat still skeptical because o f the gravity of the situation. Within 20 minutes, you were able to connect to my back-up device here and give me a clean perfect copy of my database. From there I was able to complete my update and all is working great.”

A true horror story was saved because our client had the presence of mind to setup a maintenance plan that incorporated a true disaster recovery solution.