Cibecs recovers four years of business-critical and personal data after laptop is stolen

Like most company users, Vanessa Govender always thought there would be a next day, another time to back up her critical data. After four years of never performing a backup, a substantial amount of information was at risk.

“Many of my critical business and personal files were on that laptop,” says Govender. “Funny thing is I had just bought a bunch of DVDs to back up that data when the laptop was stolen out of my car...”

* Like many companies, Vanessa's employer, Gijima, had previously relied on users to take responsibility for their business-critical data by copying their files to a central location, such as the company's file server, or to an external source - like a hard drive or DVDs.

* Like many companies should, Gijima realised the extreme financial and operational risk it was exposed to by relying on users to back up their data... which, of course, hardly ever happened because:

* Users forgot or did not know how/where to back up their data;

* Performing backups was time-consuming; and

* Many users did not want their confidential information on the company's server where it was vulnerable to unauthorised access.

Realising the need for a centrally managed, automated, data backup and recovery solution to safeguard the company's valuable data, and after extensive market research into the best available solutions, Gijima decided on Cibecs and quietly began its internal rollout.

“I was aware that there was an application called Cibecs on my laptop but never really paid much attention to it,” says Govender. “I never noticed that regular backups of my data were being made, even while I was busy working on the laptop - in fact I was totally oblivious to it.”

“I cannot begin to tell you how it felt knowing that so many years of work and other important personal documents were lost,” says Govender, recalling that fateful day her laptop was stolen.

“Many of the files were nearly impossible to recreate, never mind the amount of time it would have taken me to attempt recreating the others. I feared the worst when reporting the incident to our IT department.”

Twenty-four hours later Vanessa had access to every file she thought she had lost.

“Needless to say, I was amazed at how quickly and easily IT was able to retrieve all my data,” says Govender. “Using Cibecs we were able to recover it all and could I continue working the very next day as if nothing happened... Cibecs really saved my life.”