So you’ve purchased your brand new PC or notebook, you have lots of new photo’s, new company logo, posters, that new flashy company website, your new marketing and sales plan, prospect database you’ve just paid hundreds of pounds for and spend the last two days customising, existing customer database, last years’ accounts closed off and archived – and it’s all stored on your shiny new notebook or desktop computer you just purchased in sales…. Made a backup of anything yet?

Backing up data is a chore – nothing’s ever going to happen to my data

Many of us are too engaged in our work to even think about backup up our valuable data until it’s all too late, it can all happen too easily – that cup of coffee you accidentally split on your laptop or your computer harddisk that has been clicking for a while has just failed at 1am in the morning, hours before your big presentation to a new client – that data is now lost forever, no way of retrieving days, weeks, maybe even months worth of work, and potentially the loss of a new customer with a pipeline of future business.

50% of businesses who suffer catastrophic data loss cease trading with 12 months (1)

So by now you’ve decided that you should consider backing up your data and a wise choice too. Most people are under the impression that backing up your data is expensive – it isn’t! For most individuals and small companies, simply saving a copy of the data each evening onto a removable USB pen drive (circa £20) or external harddisk (circa £100) is perfectly sufficient. So now you have helped to eliminate the risk that should a local problem occur such as a disk failure or your PC fails to boot up in the morning, you can sleep comfortably knowing your data has been saved somewhere. If you want to go one step further, and for complete piece of mind it is a strongly recommended you keep a copy off-site, this ‘insures’ against catastrophic loss (such as your offices collapsing, fire, theft, etc).

How much data can you afford to loose?

The best way to think about back-up is to work out how much data you / your company can afford to permanently loose, huge big corporations such as HSBC back-up every 30 seconds (30 seconds of world-wide bank transactions is worth millions of pounds), where most SME companies can afford one days worth of work loss, so most backup their servers once a night onto a removable tape which is secured off-site.

“70% of backups tested indicate either a small or large problem (2)

Backing up data is only one half of the total solution – what good is a backup if it doesn’t work. Restoring the data successfully is the other half of a complete solution. Remember that presentation you were working on until 1am when it all went wrong – because you did back it up just a few hours before, you know exactly where the DVD / USB pen / harddrive is to restore the file onto another PC ready to complete ahead of your prospect meeting tomorrow. This time round, that nightly backup chore is now worth half its weight in gold!

Remember to regularly test the data you backup – just to check it really does work, as you never know when you may need it.

Quotes & References:
(1) SonicWALL Inc – leading security & data protection products for the SME market.
(2) Networking Fundamentals Ltd – Disaster Recovery Testing Laboratory. T: 01264 721680.