Horse walks into a bar…

It doesn’t matter if you’re a global distribution company or a small manufacturer of widgets; whatever your business, ensuring your systems are backed up, and recoverable, is vital for your ongoing success. It only takes a few hours of downtime, whilst you try and restore from faulty or incomplete backups for a business to lose vast sums of money.

The Upham Pub Company is well aware of the challenge to ensure all their data is reliably backed up and disaster recovery strategies are in place. They had used different suppliers in the past for their backups but found the interface design and reliability wasn’t quite cutting the mustard.

In flies Macrium Reflect! Upham have been able to back up all manner of servers, internal disk, external disks, RDX cartridges, SD cards, CDs, Blurays and USB sticks. Upham inherited a Windows Server with an RDX drive which would not cooperate with Windows Server 2008’s own backup utility, Macrium Reflect ran successfully for a year until the server drew its state pension and was retired.

Each site has one or more Windows 7 PCs running standard office software alongside specialist software such as hotel booking systems. Each hard disk is split into a Windows partition and a recovery partition. The PC uses Macrium Reflect to back-up a full image of the Windows partition to the recovery partition overnight, retaining 5 or 6 images. This allows Upham to wind back to a previous day very quickly if required.

If Upham have a corrupt hard drive they can restore to a new drive either from Macrium images stored in the recovery partition of the PC’s hard disk, or from incremental images stored on a server.

With all their data reliably backed up, there will hopefully be no long faces in these pubs!