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The office is on fire, forget the secretary and save the email

By Davey Winder in Editorial

Posted in Data Protection, Blog, email on July 4, 2008 at 9:12 am

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Kroll Ontrack obviously know a thing or two about data disasters, it is a company that spends its entire time working with the consequences of them. So who better than to do a data recovery survey with a twist: if you only had time to save one file which would it be?

Asking a cross-section of business types just what they consider to be the most vital of business data proved to be an interesting exercise. I am guessing that there was some kind of ‘assuming you had no backups’ suggestion implied in all this.

I asked my secretary, also known as ‘the wife’ or if she is in earshot ‘the lovely Yvonne’, what would she save for the good of the business. Rather sensibly, I guess, she said the accounts. “After all” she explained “HMRC are not going to accept ’sorry, they got mislaid by the courier’ as a valid excuse, are they.” She may well have a point.

Personally, I would choose exactly the same as an astonishing 81 percent of those surveyed and save my email. That’s my email message database, not my contacts file or appointments calendar, they can go hang - it is my message base that is vital to my business.

“Our statistics reveal that e-mails are the most important files for business executives,” said Phil Bridge, Managing Director, Kroll Ontrack UK. “Regardless of the size of IT budgets, organisations simply cannot afford to ignore implementing systems to help avoid severe data loss. Employee education, careful planning and rigorous backup testing of e-mail storage is the only way critical information is protected.”

The reasoning, Kroll argues, is simple: “the logistics required to restore a large e-mail system is complex, and due to its critical nature, downtime needs to be minimised.” Indeed, for this very reason many companies are now capping the storage capacity of user mailboxes and inadvertently increasing the risk of users losing their e-mails.

Kroll Ontrack put together some top tips to e-mail bliss for executives.

  • Manage your mailbox don’t let it manage you - keep it under control with regular housekeeping and archiving of old e-mails. Evaluate the importance of each e-mail and erase e-mails that you do not need. This will keep the mailbox size, and the risk of loss, at a minimum.

    Prepare - a disaster recovery plan will outline company policy and procedures for when it all goes wrong. If you don’t know what your firm’s disaster strategy is - ask!

    Don’t store e-mails locally - many executives store their oversized mailboxes locally, where it is not backed up. The safest archival method is to move items to a central drive that is regularly backed up.

    Seek advice - in the event that you accidentally delete the wrong message, your IT department should have a process to quickly retrieve the message from its backups. If this is a more serious issue, then tampering with the computer may limit what data can be retrieved.

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