Even look at the home user level. Most home users have pictures, music, resumes, documents, taxes, even financial information on their desktop or laptop, even smartphone, systems. A large percentage of these users do not back up or do not back up properly. Imagine if your hard drive crashed and all those precious memories, e-mails, contacts, collections, and documents disappeared, and you had no way of getting them back. I doubt any of us would be very happy if this happened.
For businesses, whether it be a home business, or a small, medium, or full sized company, it could be a disaster. Although you would think most would be doing backups, you would be surprised how many don't. Even with back ups at varying degrees of usefulness, can the company still operate without their data and business systems being there? Most would answer no to this question. The worse case scenario for a business is the computer system being destroyed, but the rest of the business is ok and operational.
Most large businesses have plenty of data recovery systems. Besides backups, they would have hotsites, data redundancy, mirrored servers, and other such technology solutions to ensure their protection of their data and the continuous operation of their systems. Home users, as well as small and medium sized businesses, don't have the budget and/or expertise to have the same advantage.
Here's some tips for home and small to medium sized business users...
- Do a backup at least weekly of all your user data. Side storage is cheap. Even flash drives or memorty sticks can do for some users. There are also online services that will do it for you overnight through the internet. Make sure you get all your user data backed up. User data is any data that you add, update, or change on a regular basis. If you can do it on a daily basis, that is even better.
- If at all possible do multiple version backups. Although this may not be an issue for home users, for business users it is very important. If you do only one backup and something happens to your data that you didn't notice right away and left for a time, your backups my be useless as well. By rotating daily, weekly, monthly, and even annual backup media, you can ensure you can recover from most any data disaster.
- If possible take backups offsite. This way, if there is a fire that burns up the office, your backups don't go up and flames with the computer system.
- Have a plan in place that describes exactly how you can get your system backup as soon as possible. Having a backup computer or server readily available that you can load your backup data on, reduces your businesses down time.
- Make sure you have all of your application software install disks and installation codes in a safe, but readily available, location. If you setting up a new computer system, you will probably have to reinstall all the applications that were on the computer that gets damaged.
- Manually backing up is ok, but using some sort of automated system is the best. This way you do not have to rely on someone to remember to initiate the backup. Windows itself has a simple automated backup program.
- For important transactional data always make and keep a paper copy in a safe location. Usually there are legal requirements for this being done anyways, but for data recovery, you may have to reenter a certain amount of data from scratch if the backup data does not bring you right backup to the time of the system crash.
I do security and data audits for small to medium sized business computers, workstations, and servers, as well as provide solutions and procedures. If you are interested on getting some help and advice, give me a call.
Now go protect that data!
Rob MacArthur
Technology Consulting, Services, Support, and Systems
info(at)robmac(dot)org
905.903.6425
