New business owners have a lot of worries to keep them tossing and turning at night into the wee hours. One technology ‘what if’ is the loss of critical data to a server crash, virus, hard drive failure or a larger mishap such as a fire or flood.
For new business owners working hard to build and develop their business, the thought of backup are probably not high on the priority list but any backup solution is better than none. Something as simple as copying critical data to a external hard drive or memory stick once a day or even once a week.
Sure, even memory sticks fail but at least USB memory recovery is a viable option as a simple form of data backup
Even if you do not have the time or budget to put in place a decent data backup regime simply copying essential data to an external hard drive is surely better than a lack of any sort of policy, of course the crucial element in an back up procedure is just that , it is a procedure and should be adhered to……regulary!
One of the commonest mistakes in data backup is of course not to test your back up data to ensure that it is retrievable. This may sound strange but it is very necessary as many business have found out at huge cost that although a backup was being made it had not been successful.
As well as the potential cost of attempted data recovery when a backup has been found to fail , there is also the intangible (until it happens) cost of lost business due to system down time, and in extreme cases total business failure if legislation required business records to be kept for any length of time, which can be years.
Sadly for many businesses back up protocols will be left as a low priority until an actual data loss occurs and backup, just like an insurance policy is there for when you need it even though most of the time you do not.
As well as back up to external media offsite storage is also an option, however this methodology can be quite time consuming as data needs to be uploaded or downloaded en-masse which is very time consuming and consumes a lot of bandwidth.
An emerging very effective form of data backup is coming to the fore which is of course online data backup. This simply means that once the initial backup is completed, a protocol runs in the background incrementally backing up new data on a scheduled basis.
Online data backup is becoming a very favourable option for savvy IT professionals and local computer repair companies.
Another benefit for this is if your computer/laptop gets stolen you will have a backup of all your data.
It is not really important which of these options you choose to implement into your business just as long as you have a backup in place.
And of course an effective backup policy is far less costly than the costs of disaster recovery and data recovery .
| Comments |
|
