Ask any restaurant owner when last they ran a PoS data backup and they probably won’t be able to tell you. You can replace a fingerprint reader, a PoS unit, a receipt printer and a touchscreen monitor in the event of theft or loss. But once your PoS data is corrupted or erased, it’s gone for good. Accordingly, restaurant owners must be just as committed to protecting their PoS data as they are to guarding their stock and cash.

When you consider that 70% of businesses will experience (or have already experienced) data loss through fires, accidental deletions, viruses and system failures, it becomes clear that regular backups are vital. The consequences of not being able to recover from a data loss are too big. You stand to lose revenue, customers and your reputation along with the data.

Pilot point of sale certainly considers your restaurant’s PoS data a priority. This is why we have aligned with IronTree, a leading business continuity and internet services provider, as the facilitator of secure cloud backups for all our clients. While all your restaurant’s backups will be performed with no intervention from you, it’s still important that you understand how it all works.

Nothing but the essentials

You should always back up everything, right? Not quite. While backing up all your data is the safest option, it’s also the least practical. Online backups take up server space so less is always ideal. Too much data on a server can place pressure on the bandwidth and affect the performance of systems. This is why you should only back up the data that is critical to your restaurant. All transactional data from your Pilot point-of-sale system counts as critical, including the main Pilot SQL database, as well as user files and logs.

Archive backups

One of the reasons for performing data backups is to keep a historical record of all the information necessary to meet a business’s legal obligations. For compliance reasons, businesses need to retain financial records that date back five years. This should be top of mind when Pilot backs up your PoS data with IronTree. With storage of 60 generational backup sets, you’re always able to restore usable data even if your data has been corrupted, held hostage, or deleted. Also, multiple encrypted copies of your data are stored at a world-class, secure, data centre in South Africa.

The importance of current data

Periodic incremental backups help us ensure that we only back up what’s necessary. PoS data backups are done every single day and only the changes made since the last backup will be compressed, encrypted and stored in the cloud. This means less daily backup traffic and no bandwidth clogging.

What if a backup doesn’t go through?

Pilot proactively monitors the status of every client’s backup. Our data centre agents are advised electronically if a backup did not start or complete. We will then remotely reactivate your backup with no intervention required. If we are unable to remotely connect to your site, our agents will make contact with you to correct the situation.