What's the Right Price to Pay for Backing Up Your Data?

One little accident with your business’ data and you can wind up with a big problem. Missing client information, lost orders, unpaid invoices — what’s it worth to you to be able to avoid that sort of situation?

If your business is anything like mine, the reason that you may not have a backup solution in place is not because you don’t think it’s important. It’s probably not even a matter of cost — the ability to avoid a problem like catastrophic data loss is worth a monthly expense. It’s mostly a matter that we don’t get around to such things until the catastrophe has already happened. That was the case with my own business last year: I lost six months worth of data because I hadn’t manually backed up my computer in that long and I hadn’t gone looking for an automatic back up tool.

The pricing wasn’t the problem. With tools like Mozy and SpiderOak, I can have all of my records backed up for under $20. They’re offsite, so even if something was to happen to my office, my data would still be fine. They’re automatic so that I don’t even have to think about manually backing up files. They can handle a huge amount of data, which means even my music can be backed up, along with my more important business files. It’s a price I’d be more than happy to pay — especially if I could have gone back to before my data crash and installed one of those tools then.

The right price to pay for backing up your data depends, of course, on how much information you have. If you have client records dating back years, you’re probably going to need more. But many business owners find that they can protect their data at a price under $50 per month. It’s definitely a much better deal than the cost of data recovery:

• Hundreds of dollars just on the chance that a specialist can restore a hard drive
• Hours of work for a temp to retype hard copies of records
• Hours spent trying to reconstruct data from outgoing emails and other shreds of information
• An unknown amount of lost business

That cost can vary, too, but no matter how much you pay, it’s too much. And that’s assuming that you’ll have some sort of information that you can restore from. Think about a situation like Hurricane Katrina: many businesses simply disappeared because their owners couldn’t get back to New Orleans for their records and had no other way to restore their information.

If you’re able to set up your back up solution proactively — rather than in response to some business catastrophe — you’ll also be in a position to find the best deal for your business. It’s not just a matter of cost, either; with the specialized tools available for many types of businesses, like Nomadesk, you may be able to find an option that helps you make your business more efficient, as well as protect your data.

Image — Jon A Ross

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under small business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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