Acronis warns that small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are placing too much importance on their data backup plans and too little on data retrieval and recovery strategies.   As a result of this imbalance, SMBs face otherwise avoidable periods of downtime in the event of an IT failure or other disaster.To help SMBs across all industries address this potential shortcoming, Acronis is offering a six-point guide to speed up the data recovery process and prevent damage to profits and reputation,

1.  Make sure your data recovery strategy allows you to restore data, applications and operating systems to different types of hardware or to virtual systems. Having the capability to restore to multiple environments – not just a company’s current one – can be a huge time saver.

2.   Plan for the recovery of systems first by prioritising resources and creating backup schedules to match the maximum allowable downtime for any given server.  Remember, disasters vary based on the application; a Web server that takes online orders needs to be up and running more quickly than a Web server that simply displays static pages.

3.  Back up to disk, not tape, for faster restore times.  Take advantage of high-capacity and high-performance disk drives that are decreasing in price and increasing in resiliency.  Disks are inherently more reliable, require less maintenance than tape, and can be used for online, near-line and archival storage more efficiently than tape.

4. Empower mobile employees to recover data themselves more quickly than relying on the IT department.  Use tools such as hidden partitions on laptops to save images of the systems. That way, should a user be traveling when an emergency occurs or a virus hits, the remote user will be able to restore the data and programmes on the laptops themselves.

5. Consider going virtual: recovering data from hundreds of servers can be a management nightmare; using virtualisation to consolidate the number of servers you need to run your business dramatically reduces the recovery workload in the event of a failure. Ancillary cost savings using virtual technology also are possible, based on your computing requirements.

6. Test test test. Creating a backup strategy is only the first step; make sure you test your plan to make sure it meets your needs from a technological and from a staffing perspective. Make sure backups are accessible for mission-critical systems and that you can restore your backup on any system, regardless of the platform. Then test your plan to make everyone knows exactly what to do when an outage strikes.