Believe it or not, businesses can and do burn to the ground. And even if your comprehensive insurance policy enables you to replace all your damaged IT hardware, the greatest coverage in the world can't get you your data back once it's gone.

Now, we did have one client who got incredibly lucky. Their office burned down, taking the IT and the server room with it. The fire department was able to put out the flames, and we were miraculously able to extract data from the wreckage. But where were this client's backup files? Sitting on a bunch of tapes, in the office, melted into scrap along with everything else.

This is why we urge businesses to have an offline backup method for important stuff. The most obvious low-tech solution is to entrust the daily backup tapes or discs to a staff member who physically moves them to his or her home every night and brings a new tape back to the office the next day. But guess what – you have to monitor that the tapes are actually “leaving the building” each night. An automated system such as Gravity Backup, on the other hand, transfers the data at lightning speed to our secure, reliable server every night.

But it's not enough to simply transfer files -- you also have to check them every once in a while to make sure there's no loss of data integrity. Otherwise, you may realize too late that your backup tape isn't capable of performing that urgent emergency restoration. But if you have Gravity Systems handling your ongoing IT maintenance, we'll run a check of your backup files once a month to make sure they're going to be useful when you truly need them. But whatever you do, however you do -- take it offsite!