Data protection and recovery at Company X

Everyone makes mistakes, but nobody wants everyone else to know about it when they do. At UpSource, we would never want to inform everyone know when a client of ours accidentally loses their clients’ information but these things do happen. It’s not uncommon – 48% of small businesses surveyed by data protection company Carbonite said they had suffered a serious data loss incident. The most common reasons being hard disk failure, accidental deletion and virus infection.

Although our client understandably didn’t want to be identified, they were prepared to let us tell you how we helped them in their hour of need. For the purposes of this case study, we’ll just call them Company X. At the time of the incident they didn’t use us, or any other IT company, they just called around local support companies if they had a problem.

Like many businesses, Company X had a backup system in place at their office that had been installed by a member of staff. This backed up all the files and folders on their server every day. The Sales Manager, however, was rarely in the office and he kept most of his information on his laptop, including emails, order forms and client contact information.

Working from home one afternoon his laptop crashed and then would not boot, so using his home computer he searched the internet on how to fix it. The manufacturer’s website told him to put in the restore DVD and follow the onscreen instructions, which he did. At the end of the process his laptop was working properly again, but unfortunately for him it was restored to the factory state and all the programs and data he had put on had gone. No email, no client contact details, no invoices. When his wife returned home that evening, he was in a terrible state of panic.

Fortunately for him, his wife worked for a client of UpSource and she contacted us immediately. We collected the laptop that evening and ran our data recovery software on it overnight. The next morning, his laptop was returned to him with all his email, invoices and client data recovered. He was very, very lucky – even we cannot always get every bit of data back.

On his recommendation, Company X have now become a client of UpSource and we’ve redesigned their data protection strategy. We’ve improved their internal backup systems to make them more robust and also put in place systems that automatically synchronise laptops with the server when they are in the office, and to enable travelling users to back up their laptops at home. We’ve also put in place security and encryption to prevent data falling into the wrong hands if a laptop was to be lost or stolen. Since they already had most of the equipment in place, most of our work has been configuration and this has provided them with a far superior data protection and recovery system without having to spend a lot of money on it.