Imagine the scene.  The data produced by your accounts/case management system has been lost and you need to recover from your backup.  You hastily check that you did back up last night.  Thankfully you did- phew!  However, you then discover that the backup itself, which you have been faithfully carrying out every day for years, has failed. 

This nightmare scenario was recently experienced by one of our clients and has prompted the development of a complete Off-Site Backup & Validation solution to complement our software suite.

Head of Development, Mike McCracken explained “the client’s own backup process failed, despite the fact that they had carried out everything their systems engineer had asked of them.  Thankfully they had lost only a day’s worth of data, but this still had to be re-keyed manually.  For a while, it was “all hands to the pump”, after which we sat down to work out a solution to ensure that none of our clients would ever have to go through this sort of thing again.”

Whilst the concept of off-site backup software is nothing new, Mr McCracken believes it is the validation element of the solution that will give them a vital advantage over similar 3rd party products.

He explained “We offer not only a secure backup service, but we also test and validate the backed up data & documents every day against our own program.  Therefore, if the worst should happen and our clients are forced to restore from a backup, they can be 100% sure that their case management or accounts system will continue to work properly.”

“This differs fundamentally from the normal “file validation” utility with other backup software, which at best is restricted to checking for error logs and such like.  To all intents and purposes, it may appear that everything is working properly until you need to restore from your backup.  If you then discover problems, this will be far too late in the day.”

He continued “the only way that the SC@MS data & documents may properly be validated is by testing against the SC@MS program.  Our comprehensive testing process either confirms a successful backup, or highlights any issues, which of course we can then address straight away.  We complete the service by sending our clients the results daily.”

Head of Sales, Terry Frost had a similar experience whilst in practice some years ago.  He recalled “our server, which housed amongst others all electronic copies of our clients’ work, suddenly packed up.  This led to a discovery that our backup system, which one of our girls had been running for many years by “swapping the tapes”, had, in fact, not been working.”

Mr Frost continued “the hard drive had to be sent to a specialist data recovery company.  We then had to endure 3 days during which we waited anxiously to find out whether the data could be retrieved at all, followed by a further 2-week wait whilst the experts carried out their magic.”

“Thankfully, our data was retrieved,” he said “although the sleepless nights & five-figure bill took much longer to overcome!”

The new service has already proven to be extremely popular with our clients, evoking remarks such as “excellent” and “very responsible”.  Said Mr Frost “the peace of mind that the service brings to our clients is worth its weight in gold and the concept really is a no-brainer.  The data produced by case management/accounts software is critical to our clients’ business.  We will be testing & validating this on a daily basis, so our clients know that they won’t have to fear such a catastrophic event.”

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