Is Your Small Business Backed Up?

I have one vitally important question for all of you, “Are you backing up all of your important data?”  And if the answer to this question was Yes, what is your disaster recovery plan?  If it was No, it should have been Yes, read on.

I want to share two quick stories to demonstrate the two questions above.  One is a small two person firm I now work with who for years were not backing up any of their documents and files that they were creating.  Then one day … you guessed it.  The secretary’s computer died.  They had lost literally years of work and it was quite simply, a disaster.  Had they only been doing a local backup everything could have been saved, but sometimes this is not even enough.  Take another small firm I now work with who was very diligent in doing nightly backups of their critical data.  It seems as though they were doing the right thing, yet one night the building their office was located in caught fire and everything was destroyed and they also lost all of their critical data.

The moral of this story, ensure you have two levels of backups to save your small business from critical data loss.  At large firms with dedicated IT departments, these tasks would be assigned to its members to not only have local on-site backups, but also to have an off site location to store media containing this data in case of a fire or other disaster.  However, as a small business owner you don’t have an IT department and I am going to show you why you do not need one.

Lets start with the easy part, local backups. These days the costs of storage hardware like external hard drives are incredibly cheap.  One can buy a 1TB external hard drive for just over $100 and for most small businesses this is more than enough space to back up those important files.  These drives almost always come with very easy to set up software that lets you set up tasks that back up designated folders and files each night.  To get a little more safe, your business can look into a piece of hardware called a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks).  These are systems that spread your backed up data across several hard drives and the hardware allows for a disk failure without losing any of the data.  A popular choice recently has been a device called the Drobo (Data Robotics) which can be configured with 4 hard drives up to a maximum size of 4TB each with a total size of 16TB at very reasonable prices.  A device like the Drobo can even be hooked up to your local network allowing all your computers to back up to one centralized location.

Now for the second level of protection for the business, off site backups. Well you are probably saying to me right now, “We don’t have an off site storage facility.”  Sure you do, its online, or the cloud.  There are many providers now that are taking care of all of the heavy work for you.  They are buying the hardware, software, and literally taking care of everything for you.  All that is up to you is to pick one and get set it up to copy your data to them.  Large companies like Amazon began offering pay as you go storage services several years ago, but getting the data there was not that easy.  However, recently, companies like Mozy and Backblaze have begun offering services, Mozy has a business plan called MozyPro, that offer unlimited online storage for the company’s computers to be backed up to.  Each of these services offer a small program that runs on the computers that backs up the data in the background while the computer is on and can even be in use.  These are very efficient and economical ways to ensure that your companies valuable data is safe and secure and provides your business continuity in the case of disaster.

Technology is a great leveler.  Your small business has at its disposal the tools that much larger companies use, at a fraction of the cost.  Make sure to take advantage of the new inexpensive hardware and services to make sure the critical data that the business depends on stays safe and secure.

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Tags: backups, data, small business
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