I think the obsession with backing up my data started in law school. I had a paralyzing fear that I would drop my computer or it would randomly crash and I would lose everything. The data on my computer seemed to represent proof of my entire existence over some timeframe. Without this “proof,” that period of time would have been seemingly imaginary. A horrifying concept. All the endless Westlaw and Lexis research, drafts of briefs, arguments, interrogatories and all my class audio and notes — gone. Gone as if I had been spending that time on the beach instead of glued in front of my computer being the traditional lifeless law student.
Sure, I had an external hard drive, but let’s be honest. Sometimes remembering to eat was enough of a challenge during law school. Remembering to do daily external hard drive backups? Not happening.
Instead, I thought I came up with a solution. I created an email account that was solely responsible for receiving endless drafts of files. It was a lot easier to remember than it was to back up externally and it didn’t clutter my actual email inbox. It served as a sheer backup plan in case something went wrong. Ideal? No. But it did help me feel a little less vulnerable by knowing at least my work would have a better chance at some degree of recovery.
This paranoia continued as I moved on and became an associate where every six-minute block of my life was tracked and I worked at a frantic pace with the ever-looming fear that I wasn’t doing everything fast enough for the client. The need for efficiency was crucial. There was no room for data loss. We couldn’t bill the client again, I didn’t want to lose the position on the team I was on at the firm as a result and I really didn’t feel like “volunteering” any more of my time to legal work. In a world where people agonize over every single word in a brief, that finely worded masterpiece you finally created couldn’t just vanish — that just couldn’t happen.
Thankfully, there is really no excuse to not be properly backed up nowadays. With the advancement of “always-on” options for continual backup, I no longer have to worry. Personally, we use our own programs internally for cloud storage and backup and I have all my personal docs and anything that ever gets saved to my computer constantly uploading and saved to my iCloud drive. When Apple added the desktop being immediately backed up to an iCloud file, I felt a level of stress vanish from my world. While I love this machine, if I dropped it, it got stolen or if it crashed — I didn’t lose everything anymore. The computer now became a facilitating device instead of the guardian and storage of all my important information. It turned into a tool instead of something treated like a family heirloom that was the sole keeper of all the information you needed to operate your personal and professional life.
I regularly hear others in the legal profession echo this same fear of data loss. Often many do not even think about the systems in place for data backup until they experience some sort of loss. For whatever reason, it seems many law firms try to avoid formalizing their IT needs. It never ceases to surprise me that a world with such important daily business, cases, projects and sensitive information often does not direct proper resources to their IT systems — even having an in-house lawyer handle IT issues when not doing client work.
Often the many other pressing issues cause the lack pf proper focus, attention or planning to IT management — particularly in a proactive nature including a data backup plan. However, when something does go wrong, the time lost rectifying what could have been avoided or more quickly resolved leaves firms wishing they had planned properly. As a large portion of data loss is not the result of any hacking or malicious occurrence, but instead, sheer human error, the importance of ensuring the company has a thorough data backup and disaster recovery plan in place is key.
Thankfully, lawyers are well- versed at writing thorough and articulate policies for most issues. That being said, it is important to consult with an IT professional to determine the various more-technical issues and data loss implications around which they should be structuring a policy. By no means is this a comprehensive list, but a few things to consider in order to help determine your needs and shape your data backup policy are:
• Current Data Backup Frequency. Are you backing up data? How often are these backups occurring?
• Data Backup Checks. How often are the backups being tested to ensure they are working properly?
• Ideal Data Backup Frequency. How often should your data be backed up? What is the ideal number of restore points?
• Data Backup Redundancy. Is all of the data backed up into one place or is there any sort of redundancy?
• Data Backup Guidelines. Are all users following backup guidelines? Are users saving their data to proper files in order to be properly backed up according to the plan?
• Data Recovery. If you are performing backups, do you know how to recover your data if there is a loss?
• Business Continuity. How will the company run if there is a loss/disaster/failure?
• Recovery Time. How long can the company be down without affecting the bottom line? Seconds? Minutes? Hours? Days?
• Recovery Point. How much data can the company lose without affecting the bottom line? Seconds? Minutes? Hours? Days?
• Insurance. Does the company have insurance in place in case of lost data?
Once you have answered these questions, it will be easier to work with your IT team to determine the options available to best cover the needs and goals of your company. With countless options available for on-site, off-site, daily, hourly, geo-redundant datacenters, etc., a backup plan can be custom fit to the specific needs of your company. While building a more ideal IT system involves more than a backup plan, this is a key component and is a great way to check the status of your current practices or start on the road to a more proactive IT structure.
Bahar Sharifan is president of Wasatch I.T., a Murray-based provider of outsourced IT services for small- and medium-sized businesses.