Disaster Recovery Planning for Dynamics GP

How often does your company perform a back up your Microsoft Dynamics GP? If you update your financial data daily, then a daily back-up is probably a part of your disaster recovery plan. This ensures that should your servers go down, at worst you have lost one day worth of data.

A good back-up plan will allow you to have data available when you need it – but you still need to ensure that your back-ups are stored securely. It is also important to make sure the back-ups do not reside on the same drive or server as your database, as a single failure can wipe out both your data and your back-up. It is important that you set up a plan to store your data off site so that redundant backups are located in different physical locations. This will guard against catastrophic loss due to accident or other interruptions.

But back-ups can only do so much, you should have a well documented plan in place for disaster recovery should something happen and you need to re-import data. Make sure your process involves a plan to prep the Dynamics GP database first, and then to prep the files you need to import. Make sure you have proper procedure in place for how you will import the data, and how you will test that import, verifying that all data made it over.

Once you have established a disaster recovery procedure, it is very important you test your procedures. Most companies rarely, if ever, have to access a back-up. For this reason, you should test your restores from back-up quarterly to ensure everything is running smoothly. This is especially true if your back-ups are stored on an external source such as tape.

By Intellitec Solutions, Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner serving Pennsylvania