Backing up important data should be a regular task for most businesses, with daily tape rotation schemes and secure storage to guarantee the safety and privacy of your data. One simple mistake, or software glitch, or even hardware failure can set an unprepared company back countless dollars and man hours in an attempt to retrieve lost information or corrupted records. Worse yet, should any of your data tapes get lost or put in the wrong place you may have to issue a security breach alert and credit monitoring if the tapes contain private customer information. This could be devastating for a small company, and a grievous injury to all others regardless of their size and capability.

Yet all too many of the most vulnerable companies, particularly the smaller organizations, don’t take their tape rotation seriously enough. These companies utilize complex or unsafe data management schemes that rely on in-house storage and irregular tape rotation. Such a mistake could be more than costly to these businesses; it could be deadly. This is why it is so important to set good information management policies that include regular backups, rotating tapes on a regular basis, and storing backup tapes at a secure offsite location to prevent catastrophic data loss.

Secure data rotation schemes don’t have to be uber complex or expensive. The most common system is simply backing up the data every day on 14 disks, which are rotated every two weeks. However this leaves you open to losing data due to corruption that is not caught in time. Perhaps the best known system is the Grandfather-Father-Son system that uses 4 tapes for daily backups, 5 tapes for weekly backups, and 11 tapes for monthly backups (with the last monthly tape archived permanently as a yearly archive). This system is more secure than the Round Robin, but it requires offsite storage to work. However, most mid-sized businesses have found the GFS system to be extremely advantageous. After all, losing data and having a breach of security are hardly alternative options.