Mistake #5: Not keeping your backups in well-chosen and varied locations
Texas is a big place, and one geographically disparate enough to have a large variety of natural disasters. We have tornadoes, hurricanes, brush fires, and floods. We even had a tiny earthquake in the Dallas area a couple of years ago.
We also have the normal variety of non-natural threats: thieves, saboteurs, arsonists, leaky roofs, power surges. Add that to the threats inherent to an IT infrastructure: human error, hardware failures, hackers, software bugs. Those are a lot of threats. What’s an IT guy/gal to do?
Make backups as often as your data loss/recovery time strategy dictates.
Either make the backups to a different server/disk pool than the database, or quickly copy them to a different location once the backup is complete.
If the secondary location isn’t offsite, get a copy offsite as soon as you can. The time period within which backups are required to have offsite copies should be governed by how much data you can afford to lose in a site disaster. (More about “affordability”, next time.)
Be prepared for localized and whole-site disasters. You and your end users have worked hard to make your databases the valuable information stores they are today, and you owe yourselves (and them) no less.