Do I Need a Backup?
December 4th, 2008 by JeffAustin Lane operates with the belief that there are certain things that every business network needs. One such requirement is a properly-sized backup solution. For more information about what Austin Lane considers a properly-sized backup solution, please Contact Austin Lane Technologies, Inc.
According to a recent Dallas Morning News article entitled “Computer crash hinders Texas Attorney General’s Medicaid fraud case“, there is one state agency that wishes they had a valid backup that they could restore their data from. In the article, it is claimed that as much as 50% of the work performed in the last 8 months from the Texas Attorney General’s Office in Tyler was lost.
The biggest argument that we hear from people that don’t want to backup their data is that it costs too much. If you agree with this argument, you should ask yourself a simple question: “How much would it affect my business if I lost all of the data that is stored on my computer systems?” If you are like most businesses, you will quickly discover that the few thousand dollars for a business-quality backup system will be much less than what it would cost to replicate all of that data.
What would it cost to replace 50% of the work you performed over the last 8 months? I will use a small law office with one lawyer and one paralegal as an example. I will assume that the paralegal is billable at $80/hour and the lawyer is billable at $200/hour. In addition, salaries are paid to the paralegal and lawyer at half of their billable rates, or $40/hour and $100/hour respectively. If both the lawyer and paralegal worked 40 hours per week for the 8 months, they would have each logged 1280 hours. If you lost half your work, you would have lost 640 hours worth of work for both the lawyer and paralegal. I will assume that the number of lost hours of work would be equal to the number of hours it would take to recreate all of the lost information. If you just want to count salaries, that would be $25,600 for the paralegal and $64,000 for the lawyer that the firm would have to pay to do work that has already been done. If both people in the law firm were billable 80% of the time, the lost billable time that would be used to recreate the lost work would be $40,960 for the paralegal and $102,400 for the lawyer. This comes to a grand total of $89,600 in additional wages and $143,360 for lost opportunity costs which comes out to $232,960 in direct and indirect costs to the firm due to the fact that they lost 50% of their data for the last 8 months.
I know for some of you that $232,000 may not seem like a lot of money, but for a small two-person law firm, that is a huge amount of money. Do you think this law firm could survive, or would they have to close their doors because they are unable to do additional work because of the lost work and they are unable to recreate the lost work because it costs too much?
As you can see, a good, solid backup plan with business-class hardware and software quickly pays for itself if it can help ensure your business does not lose its mission-critical data.