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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There’s been a lot of talk lately about “the cloud” and how it affects businesses. First, what is the cloud? The cloud has often been synonymous with the whole internet, so what we’re talking about here is cloud computing. It’s been more commonly called Software as a Service (SaaS) and refers to software applications hosted on the Internet like Salesforce.com and Google Apps.
Technically, in addition to SaaS there is also Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service. For example, Salesforce.com also has Force.com which acts as a PaaS, allowing developers to add on to the basic Salesforce.com software. Amazon Web Services acts as an IaaS for storing data, streaming video and other options in the cloud.
Cloud computing can be public, private or virtual private (you get a private section of a public provider). It’s really like using a mainframe computer in the 60′s – all the outlying parties use one main computer. It’s just that now that computer is on the web, not in the basement.
So what’s the big deal, you ask? You may be a small business owner with only a few computers. But, here’s the rub. What if you grow? How do you scale your business? Continue reading .
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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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