4 Data Loss Risks You Can Prevent

Product Updates / August 3, 2017 / Kristie

How important is the data that you have in Daylite? What would happen if you were to sit at your desk or pick up your iPhone, and realized that your Daylite data is gone?

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If you’re like most of our customers, the data in Daylite is the lifeline of your business. From your customer info, to projects and deals on the table, Daylite keeps your business moving forward.

But what steps are you taking to make sure you’re avoiding the risk of data loss? And are those measures really enough to prevent data loss?

Over the years, our support team has unfortunately heard of too many cases where people thought they were taking adequate measures to protect their critical info from data loss, only to find out too late that they were wrong. The good news is that all these cases can be avoided so they don’t happen to you.

Here are 4 data loss risks you can avoid.

Computer freeze, crashes, or power outages

Some customers don’t realize they’re not backing up their data properly until it’s too late. Our Technical Support Agent, Irene, can remember when a customer’s computer hosting their Daylite Server crashed. When they got a new computer, they thought they could restore Daylite from a Time Machine backup, only to realize there was no Daylite Server backup– all their data was gone. If you’re not backing up properly and your hard drive fails, you’re at risk of losing your data. Sometimes all it takes is a power outage or a computer crash, causing a corruption and your data on Daylite Server is lost.

How to avoid this:

Daylite Cloud customers: You don’t have to worry about this because your backups are stored on our servers and safely backed up.

Daylite Self-Serve customers: Best practice for backing up your data should include at minimum a weekly backup of your Daylite data, which includes offsite storage. Follow these instructions for setting up automatic database backups. We also recommend doing manual backups before doing a major Daylite update, updating your macOS and even prior to cases such as flooding, a major storm, or forest fires. Follow these instructions for creating a manual data backup. It’s important to note that Time Machine backups cannot be used to backup your Daylite database.

Out-of-date backups

In some cases, data loss isn’t losing the entire database, but still losing important recent data. Our Customer Support Manager, Mat, can remember an unfortunate case where a customer had a server sync issue that they didn’t catch until it was too late. Syncing had stopped but the customer didn’t notice it or didn’t pay attention and they continued to add data to Daylite. All this time, that data was being saved in Daylite, but not syncing with the server because sync had stopped working. Months later the customer needed to recreate their offline and when doing that, they discovered month’s worth of data missing. 

How to avoid this:

Daylite Cloud customers: You don’t have to worry about backing up your data because that’s all handled and monitored by our engineering team, however, it’s still important to contact our team if you notice a syncing error.

Daylite Self-Serve customers: You can avoid this by always paying attention to syncing errors in Daylite and always checking that your backups are up-to-date before restoring an offline or making any major updates to Daylite Server. That way if you need to revert to a backup of your data, you know it’s up-to-date so you don’t lose any recent info added to the database.

Lost or stolen computers

If you don’t have external storage to save your backups offsite and your Mac that’s hosting Daylite Server is stolen or lost, there goes all your data backups. Our Technical Support Agent, Ray, can remember when a customer let go of an employee and they left with the laptop that hosted their server. The customer didn’t have a backup of their data stored offsite, so when the ex-employee left with their Daylite Server, their only data backups went with it.

How to avoid this:

Daylite Cloud customers: You don’t have to worry about this because your backups are stored on our servers and we have backups of all our backups.

Daylite Self-Serve customers: You can avoid this by doing backups on external storage and storing them off-site. That way if your computer is lost or stolen, you can still get a backup of all your data from your external storage.

Fire, flood, & other natural disasters

Our Technical Support Agent, Preston, can remember when a customer had an office fire and lost everything. Even if you’re backing up your data on external storage, a natural disaster such as a fire or flood can put you at risk of data loss. If you’re not storing a copy of your data backups off-site, you could still be at risk.

How to avoid this:

Daylite Cloud customers: You don’t have to worry about this because your backups are stored on our servers and we have copies of our backups in multiple locations in the event that there’s a natural disaster.

Daylite Self-Serve customers: You can avoid this by doing backups on external storage and storing them offsite. If there is a flood or fire in your office, you can still get a backup of all your data from your external storage offsite. There are also online backup services you can use such as Backblaze.

These are data loss risks you can easily avoid by taking necessary precautions to secure your data. For Self-Serve customers interested in learning more about safe data backup strategies, read this post Database backup strategies for Daylite Server.

Don’t want to worry about backups?

If you don’t want to have to deal with backing up your database ever again, contact us and move to Daylite Cloud. Get the benefits of working offline without the headache of managing the server.

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