A sure way to create grumbling and complaining in any company is for the facilities manager or safety manager to schedule a fire drill. Employees complain about the loudness of the alarm, the inconvenience of having to troop outside and wait for the all-clear, and the work that didn't get done in the meantime. But it happens, or should, in every company. It's the only way to make sure that all the alarms really work and that employees will really respond by evacuating properly.

On the other hand, if you would prefer to create grumbling and complaining (or, perhaps, full scale panic) in the IT department, schedule a data fire drill – ask for some crucial data to be restored from an existing backup. It is surprising how many companies never considered how important it is to demonstrate that their data backup plan is not only in place and being carried out faithfully, but that it can actually result in data being restored, if necessary. This highlights the fact that the necessary steps in a thorough backup and recovery plan are taken for granted, glossing over both the number of steps involved and the possibilities for failure of any step in the plan.

For starters, of course, the data has to be present in a form allowing backup. The necessary backup hardware and software must be available and functioning properly, and personnel must be competent and practiced in performing an adequate backup procedure. The backup data must be correctly documented and stored in a safe facility. Then, of course, the proper data restoration procedure must be applied with properly functioning equipment. When you consider the number of sub-steps implied in this list of necessary functions, you begin to get an idea of the opportunities the infamous Murphy has to cause one little thing to go wrong – and one thing is all it takes for the entire plan to go up in smoke. Nowhere is the adage of the chain being no stronger than its weakest link more true than in the backup and restoration of your data.

SalvageData sees the results of the failure of backup and recovery plans all the time. Although this gives us more business, we would like to help businesses avoid this most preventable source of data loss by formulating – and testing – a rock-solid backup and data recovery plan. Contact SalvageData to help you put a strong, unbreakable chain in place to protect your data.

And, if you already have what you believe to be a good plan in place, run a data fire drill and see what happens. If you are responsible for your company's data, it's really the only way for you to be confident that a real data emergency won't find you with your pants down – or on fire.