Article

The Basics of Backup

September 6, 2018

Excerpt: Backup is an essential operation for every law firm – and yet, often poorly understood. Having an adequate backup is implicit in the ABA Model Rules for Professional Conduct and their state counterparts, as any legal ethicist will tell you. One of the lawyer’s duties is to competently represent clients. How can you do that if your case files and communications are lost? You could have a hardware failure of your server or a disk crash. What if your cloud provider shut its doors, rendering client data inaccessible? Perhaps your laptop is stolen from your vehicle with client data for a pending matter. There are all kinds of situations where you could lose data or not be able to access it. That is where your backup comes into play. Should you have a catastrophe, you would restore data from your backup and be back in business.

A local backup is also a necessity if you use cloud services and your Internet connection goes down. You could certainly take your laptop to a public open Wi-Fi and get to your data that way, but having a local backup of your data is a good idea too. It gives you a safety net should something catastrophic happen to your cloud provider.

Read the entire article here.