The first rule of backup is ‘If you can’t restore it, then it’s not a backup’, but in reality how many of you are really backing up what is important or just going through the motions?
Small Business Backup Checklist
According to BackBlaze in their annual survey, 94% of computer users still risk data loss by not backing up regularly enough.
The risk to your business by losing data is not just the inconvenience of having to do some re-work, but it can affect your credibility, sales, leads, reputation and ultimately your bottom line as well as potential lawsuits filed by clients regarding professional liability.
Data loss can occur because of many reasons including human error, hardware failure such as a hard disk crashes, software corruption, hardware destruction, theft, loss or viruses and since more of a companies business is done using computers then backup should be one of the most important I.T. tasks.
Source: BackBlaze
Backup is different to Disaster Recovery, in that when a disaster happens, you need a prepared plan to recovery and continue your business, but backup deals purely with data loss prevention and recovery. The best backup plan would be that every piece of important data was backed up immediately when it was created, but in the real world this is seldom possible for every type of data/record that you may have, so compromises must be made. Backup doesn’t usually deal with application settings and configuration, but in small businesses it maybe easier and more convenient to include this.
The first step in the small business backup check-list is to identify your data repositories. Depending on the size of your company and the type of data/records that you have this maybe easy, but consider that as well as documents you may have in your ‘My Documents’ folder on your laptop or server, what about your invoices, sales records, inventory or other client/customers records/data. Do you use email, online ‘Cloud’ based applications, other databases or is there data on your smart-phone? Ideally data should never be stored on Laptops or smart-phones, but in today’s fast paced mobile life, invariably it is.
How often does your data change? You possibly don’t have to backup 100% of all your data every day, but the trade-off is, that the more that you backup, the more secure your data is, but the cost of storing your backups increases.
The type of backup solution you choose to implement depends on how much data you need to backup, how often it changes, what your budget is and if you need to comply with any data retention laws. Backups can be fully automatic, semi-automatic or manual and can include a variety of software and hardware solutions including tape, CD/DVD, NAS, servers, On-line (‘Cloud’) or even USB drives. No matter what solution you choose make sure that your data is encrypted, the backups are stored securely off-site and that the process is monitored to ensure that the backups are actually working.
And don’t forget as you add new data repositories or stop using one then to revisit your backup plan.
Please download our Small Business Backup Checklist to help you ensure that you have everything important backed up and secure to keep your business running.
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