Data Backups - One Key to Business Survival
Rick Parrott asked:
Your customer data is a precious resource that can literally be worth its weight in gold! If used properly, it can be mined over and over for additional sales and referrals. Do you use this gold mine to increase the profitability of your business?
You should! It can mean the difference between business survival and failure.
Why then do so few business owners take the time to ensure that it is adequately protected? Are we too busy? Perhaps you just didn’t know how to protect it, or couldn’t afford the software and hardware required to back up your data correctly.
Ask yourself these questions:
Is there anything more important to my business than my customer data? What would happen to my business if I were to loose all of my data?
Consider this common scenario. A client calls frantic that she’d loose her business if she couldn’t recover her customer data. She had over five years of information on her computer when the hard drive decided to make her life interesting.
So what are her choices? Renter the data manually, if she has any hard copies available. Call everyone and ask for their contact information again, won’t that make them feel secure about her company. Or call a data recovery technician. Their services can start at a thousand dollars and go up rapidly from there!
Windows XP provides a fully functional backup utility, for free! In fact, many of the commercial backup products use this backup to save the data. All you are paying for is the user interface, the window you enter information into.
Before you run the setup wizard, you need to answer a few questions.
What data do I need to backup?
Only backup data that is necessary. Use the KISS (Keep It Simple Silly) method. Your customer database and correspondence should be backed up as a minimum.
How often do I want to back up my data?
How often does your customer data change? Does a significant amount of data change on a daily basis? Weekly?
Where do I want to store my data backup?
Most data backups still use a tape drive to store the data. The problem is that they cost a fortune! The tapes alone are expensive. Alternatives are to store your data backup on another computer on your network or copy it to a CD or DVD writable disk.
Ok, so you want to backup your data. What now? Before we do that review the table below:
Full Backup
Copies and stores a complete duplicate of your data every time it runs. Takes the most time to run and the most storage space. Quickest data recovery feature. Easiest!
Incremental Backup
Copies and stores only data changed since the last backup. Must be combined with a full backup, and any other incremental backups. Most complicated.
Deferential Backup
Copies and stores data changed since the last full backup. Must be combined with a full backup and the last deferential backup. Middle of the road.
If you have a relatively small amount of data, I would suggest a daily full backup. If you have a larger amount of data you might combine the full backup with a deferential backup. Simple huh?
The next question is how to store the data backup. Even though it takes a little extra work, I have my clients back their data up to a DVD writable disk. First, set the wizard to back the data up to a folder. Usually this folder is on another computer. Then burn this data to a DVD burner and place the disk it in a secure location for retrieval as necessary.
If you don’t feel comfortable setting this up yourself, any competent PC technician can do it for you.
Whether you do the setup yourself or have it setup by a professional technician you are taking the first step in ensuring the long term survival of your business. Please take the time to do this.
Ultimately your customers don’t care how or why you lost their information, they just care that you did. I’ll leave you with this statistic:
Estimates suggest that 80% of small businesses that suffer a serious computer failure cease trading within two years. Will yours be one of them?
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Your customer data is a precious resource that can literally be worth its weight in gold! If used properly, it can be mined over and over for additional sales and referrals. Do you use this gold mine to increase the profitability of your business?
You should! It can mean the difference between business survival and failure.
Why then do so few business owners take the time to ensure that it is adequately protected? Are we too busy? Perhaps you just didn’t know how to protect it, or couldn’t afford the software and hardware required to back up your data correctly.
Ask yourself these questions:
Is there anything more important to my business than my customer data? What would happen to my business if I were to loose all of my data?
Consider this common scenario. A client calls frantic that she’d loose her business if she couldn’t recover her customer data. She had over five years of information on her computer when the hard drive decided to make her life interesting.
So what are her choices? Renter the data manually, if she has any hard copies available. Call everyone and ask for their contact information again, won’t that make them feel secure about her company. Or call a data recovery technician. Their services can start at a thousand dollars and go up rapidly from there!
Windows XP provides a fully functional backup utility, for free! In fact, many of the commercial backup products use this backup to save the data. All you are paying for is the user interface, the window you enter information into.
Before you run the setup wizard, you need to answer a few questions.
What data do I need to backup?
Only backup data that is necessary. Use the KISS (Keep It Simple Silly) method. Your customer database and correspondence should be backed up as a minimum.
How often do I want to back up my data?
How often does your customer data change? Does a significant amount of data change on a daily basis? Weekly?
Where do I want to store my data backup?
Most data backups still use a tape drive to store the data. The problem is that they cost a fortune! The tapes alone are expensive. Alternatives are to store your data backup on another computer on your network or copy it to a CD or DVD writable disk.
Ok, so you want to backup your data. What now? Before we do that review the table below:
Full Backup
Copies and stores a complete duplicate of your data every time it runs. Takes the most time to run and the most storage space. Quickest data recovery feature. Easiest!
Incremental Backup
Copies and stores only data changed since the last backup. Must be combined with a full backup, and any other incremental backups. Most complicated.
Deferential Backup
Copies and stores data changed since the last full backup. Must be combined with a full backup and the last deferential backup. Middle of the road.
If you have a relatively small amount of data, I would suggest a daily full backup. If you have a larger amount of data you might combine the full backup with a deferential backup. Simple huh?
The next question is how to store the data backup. Even though it takes a little extra work, I have my clients back their data up to a DVD writable disk. First, set the wizard to back the data up to a folder. Usually this folder is on another computer. Then burn this data to a DVD burner and place the disk it in a secure location for retrieval as necessary.
If you don’t feel comfortable setting this up yourself, any competent PC technician can do it for you.
Whether you do the setup yourself or have it setup by a professional technician you are taking the first step in ensuring the long term survival of your business. Please take the time to do this.
Ultimately your customers don’t care how or why you lost their information, they just care that you did. I’ll leave you with this statistic:
Estimates suggest that 80% of small businesses that suffer a serious computer failure cease trading within two years. Will yours be one of them?
Free iPod Get a free ipod today!
How to backup your business data properly
Michael Cottier asked:
Business data is perhaps the most important data that exists on computers, and can literally destroy some businesses that rely on their data. This is why every business needs to do weekly, or daily, backups of their data. But with so many backup choices, a business owner can feel frustrated and worried about their choice. See, some backup methods are more reliable then others, but others are more convenient then the reliable ones. If you are a business owner, you want a backup solution that is both reliable and convenient to use. So let’s talk about the current business data backup solutions available to you, and how to implement them correctly.
The first data backup method I will discuss is hard disk imaging, also known as cloning. This is, in my opinion, the best data backup solution for anyone from home users to successful business owners. The reason being because it saves every last scrap of data that you have on your hard drive, so basically should you ever have to restore your backup because of data loss, all of it will be given back to you. It also is the quickest and simplest method of data backup for someone with little knowledge of computers and doesn’t have time to spend backing up data all day.
The next backup solution for your business is remote online backup. This means your data will be saved on a secure server, in a remote location that is far away from you. This is good for many reasons, but mainly it protects you from losing everything in case of a natural disaster that might take out your whole business or home office. Backing up your files online is also pretty cheap and convenient, and sending your files their can be as easy as one click. Another good reason for choosing an online backup company is because they also backup your files using professional software and hardware, to make sure that your data is literally locked away in a digital vault and will never disappear.
The last business data backup solution I will discuss is external storage devices which are very simple, and pretty useful, so I thought it was worth mentioning. External devices that store data can come in a variety of ways. Most common are external hard drives and memory sticks. Many people are choosing memory sticks these days because they easily plug right into your USB port, and can hold gigabytes of data, which is usually more then enough, especially for text documents and stuff like that.
DVD and CD burners can also be external, and perhaps are the best choice for most people that are always on the move. Just like the old floppy discs, external DVD or CD burners allow you to store data quickly and accurately, but CD’s and DVD’s whole a lot more data then a floppy ever could. As for drag and drop ease, that is actually possible with all burners these days, and should be considered. Imagine being able to just click save on a file, and it saves it to your disc.
Well that is just about all of the major data backup solutions that are available for businesses. There are of course many other backup options that exist, but the ones I talked about are the most common, most effective and easiest to implement. Before I end this article though, I would like to remind business owners that have computer servers, to use disk imaging software on a daily basis. Servers store a lot of data, and most of it is important, so be sure to back that data up or you will be in for one big headache if anything should ever happen.
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No comments
Business data is perhaps the most important data that exists on computers, and can literally destroy some businesses that rely on their data. This is why every business needs to do weekly, or daily, backups of their data. But with so many backup choices, a business owner can feel frustrated and worried about their choice. See, some backup methods are more reliable then others, but others are more convenient then the reliable ones. If you are a business owner, you want a backup solution that is both reliable and convenient to use. So let’s talk about the current business data backup solutions available to you, and how to implement them correctly.
The first data backup method I will discuss is hard disk imaging, also known as cloning. This is, in my opinion, the best data backup solution for anyone from home users to successful business owners. The reason being because it saves every last scrap of data that you have on your hard drive, so basically should you ever have to restore your backup because of data loss, all of it will be given back to you. It also is the quickest and simplest method of data backup for someone with little knowledge of computers and doesn’t have time to spend backing up data all day.
The next backup solution for your business is remote online backup. This means your data will be saved on a secure server, in a remote location that is far away from you. This is good for many reasons, but mainly it protects you from losing everything in case of a natural disaster that might take out your whole business or home office. Backing up your files online is also pretty cheap and convenient, and sending your files their can be as easy as one click. Another good reason for choosing an online backup company is because they also backup your files using professional software and hardware, to make sure that your data is literally locked away in a digital vault and will never disappear.
The last business data backup solution I will discuss is external storage devices which are very simple, and pretty useful, so I thought it was worth mentioning. External devices that store data can come in a variety of ways. Most common are external hard drives and memory sticks. Many people are choosing memory sticks these days because they easily plug right into your USB port, and can hold gigabytes of data, which is usually more then enough, especially for text documents and stuff like that.
DVD and CD burners can also be external, and perhaps are the best choice for most people that are always on the move. Just like the old floppy discs, external DVD or CD burners allow you to store data quickly and accurately, but CD’s and DVD’s whole a lot more data then a floppy ever could. As for drag and drop ease, that is actually possible with all burners these days, and should be considered. Imagine being able to just click save on a file, and it saves it to your disc.
Well that is just about all of the major data backup solutions that are available for businesses. There are of course many other backup options that exist, but the ones I talked about are the most common, most effective and easiest to implement. Before I end this article though, I would like to remind business owners that have computer servers, to use disk imaging software on a daily basis. Servers store a lot of data, and most of it is important, so be sure to back that data up or you will be in for one big headache if anything should ever happen.
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