March 31st is World Backup Day. In celebration, here are some tips to get your backup system in place.
First, consider all of the data that is on your computer and what would happen to your business if all of it was suddenly gone. How long would it take to reconstruct the data? Would it be even possible to reconstruct the data? You can’t reconstruct email if it wasn’t backed up.
How about orders, invoices, customer data? Accounting data? If it’s not printed on paper the data is probably gone forever and in the case of fire or flood, the printed files may be gone also.
Here are your three main considerations when creating a backup plan:
- How often it needs to be backed up
- How much data needs to be backed up (in MB or GB)
- Where to back up your data
Backing up your data is the most important and most often neglected aspect of running a small business. How often you back up your data depends on how much data you can afford to lose. It can be done continuously, daily, weekly or monthly. Consider the nature of your business and how much new data is being entered to determine the frequency of your back-ups.
I back up my data daily.
Data can be lost due to a hard drive failure, data corruption due to a virus or worm, or theft or destruction of the computer. Because of the latter possibilities, your data also needs to be backed up “off site”. Backing up data from one hard drive to another in the same computer or on the same network will prevent data loss from a hard drive failure or virus, but not from theft, fire or flood. Continue reading .
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If you are running a home office or small business, your computer is no longer just a toy – it’s a vital part of your business. What happens to your business if your computer is down for a week or, worse yet, all your business data is lost forever?
There are two things you must have on a business computer… an Internet security suite and a data backup system.
A security suite contains, at its core, a software firewall, antivirus and anti-spyware. There will be add-ons like Identity Theft protection, spam protection and parental control, but the main things you NEED are the first three. Continue reading .
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Most of the Wall Street earnings reports coming out these days show a decrease in revenue, but an increase in profits. How is this possible?
By cutting costs. By lowering company expenses, lower income still generates a profit.
We always try to instill cost savings measures when dealing with small businesses. Why spend $400 for Microsoft Office when you can use the free OpenOffice? Why travel on a business meeting when you can teleconference? Why pay long distance phone charges when you can use VOIP?
Several cost cutting measures using technology are outlined in a PCWorld post. They cover things like online phone services, freelancer web sites and offsite file storage and backup.
One tool they cover is ClearApps Network Inventory Advisor. It’s one of those time-saving tools you come across every so often.
Let’s say you have a small business with up to 25 computers and no IT department – how do you keep track of all those computers? For $89 (higher for more than 25 computers), ClearApps will survey all of them, showing you all of the hardware and software (including version!) on each computer, plus give you alerts, like anti-virus not installed or turned off, low hard drive space, etc.
This is a great tool for office managers or computer servicing companies.
Another interesting tool they came up with is called Egnyte. It’s an online file storage/backup service with an interesting twist. For an extra $10/month, you set up an old computer or a hard drive as a file server for your office. By adding Egnyte’s software, it continually backs up all of the files to their server.
That way you have ready access to large files locally, but they’re all backed up offsite. If you lose your Internet connection, no problem. The file server will reconnect and synchronize whenever the connection is restored.
If you just have a single computer, you can opt out of this service and just map a virtual drive to Egnyte’s server for file storage and offsite backups. It’s a little more expensive than, say, Mozy, but it’s worth investigating..
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I recently came across a blog by Adrian Wong of TechARP who was experiencing about a 10% error rate on old CD-R’s that had backed up data on them.
Some of these were brand name CD’s and some generic brands, but all were less than 10 years old and were stored in a cool, dry and dark area.
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes of ZDNet didn’t experience the same data loss rate, but said it may be attributable to verifying the data at the time of backup. He also recommends Elprime Media Recovery ($19.95) for dead disks.
Whatever the case, with the decrease in cost of hard drives and even web space it only makes sense to take any backed up CD’s/DVD’s and transfer them to a new medium.
Continue reading .
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