It is vitally important that every business have a disaster recovery plan for its electronic data stores. Your company's data includes more than simple Word documents and e-mail messages; it also includes you databases and web site information. One of the worst things that can happen to your business, whether it is large or small, is to lose any of your electronic data due to hardware failure, software corruption, or even to a natural disaster. Unfortunately each of these three things happens more than you might want to think about. But, by being prepared you can be one step ahead of the game. If you company uses an SQL database, it is vitally important that you have regular backups of the data. The best practice for any company is to have a local copy of the data as well as offsite backup in case of any major disaster to your physical building. One of the best things you can do with your SQL data is to replicate the data to a backup server as well as an offsite backup location. This will ensure that your data is available should you ever need to restore it and there is some form of damage to your servers. By having a local copy you can do simple restorations, and by having an offsite copy, you are covered in case something happens to your building. Microsoft SQL Server allows you the ability to replicate your data to other servers running SQL Server, in order to backup your database. This process allows you to replicate your data to another server at your company location, or via the Internet to a SQL server hosted by an online data backup provider. If your local server should fail, you will have the ability to restore it from one of your replicated copies and quickly get your database back up and running. Microsoft SQL Server offers three types of SQL replication. They are: merge replication, snapshot replication and transactional replication. Snapshot replication simply copies all database objects exactly as they are at any given moment in time. Transactional replication copies changes to the database as they happen in real-time. Merge replication first completes a snapshot replication and then follows it with transactional replication as data changes. SQL Server allows you to easily configure it to perform each of the three SQL replication methods over the internet. This allows for you to be able to backup your data online just incase you ever need to restore it. The minimum acceptable backup would be a snapshot replication each night. One of the most important things for your business success is its electronic data. The data your company generates each day has already cost your company both time and money. Trying to recreate data is not what you, as a business owner, ever want to have to do. As long as you plan for the unexpected and backup your data regularly, you will not have to ever go back and try and recreate your data from scratch.
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