A proactive approach to IT Support

If you lay down the correct systems and infrastructure, recovery from serious IT problems can be made much easier and much less expensive.

Take the fairly common example of hard drive failure. Once a drive has failed, and most drives fail eventually, it may not be possible to retrieve the data from it. And if it is possible, it may need the specialist help of a data recovery expert operating in clean rooms to dismantle the drive, repair the drive and extract what data is left on the undamaged parts of the drive. This can cost upwards of thousands of pounds and may take some days or weeks to make the recovery attempt, which does not have any guarantee of success.

Two services we offer to mitigate against this kind of problem include PC monitoring, and a comprehensive and inexpensive off-site cloud backup solution.

PC Monitoring

PC monitoring can alert us of impending drive failures through the use of SMART technology built into almost all modern drives. Essentially this system warns us before the drive has failed completely. The SMART technology works around problems while it can, moving data from less reliable areas and flagging up the problems. This can provide the time needed to take action before the drive fails completely.

Backup

A simple backup or copy of the data on the drive may be all that is needed to recover from an otherwise disastrous issue. I’m sure you can appreciate the relief clients feel after they’ve been reassured that their data is easily recoverable from the backup.

There are many types of backup that you can employ using a variety of hardware and software options resulting in numerous advantages and disadvantages of each system. Our solution is to ensure that all data files on a computer, including the data on external drives, are backed up to a secure off-site location. This negates the need to rely on less reliable backup options such as:

• backing up using a manual process resulting in less frequent backups,
• backing up to local external drives, which can often suffer the same fate as the machines they are backing up.

Our backup solution is unlimited, continuous, automatic, monitored, managed, off-site, encrypted, and very affordable.

Data can also be lost through user errors. We all make errors – we’re not robots. This is why our backup system in conjunction with a support contract allows us to restore files that have been lost completely, or to restore a file to an earlier version that have been recently incorrectly modified and important data within it has been lost. Our 30 day retention policy allows us to “go back in time” up to 30 days in order to recover lost data files.

Whilst hard drive failure is a relatively common problem, most problems you can think of can be heavily protected against with a good monitoring, protection and backup policy, which is exactly what we offer with our IT Support services.

If you require IT Support in Manchester or the surrounding areas, or in the North West, find out more about the services we offer or go ahead and sign up to one of our standard support contracts, or contact us for more information or to tailor a bespoke IT Support service customised to your needs.