In the course of my business, I discuss backups a lot. On my blog, with my clients, with friends. Just about any business owner who utilizes technology – who doesn’t?
Image by Melodi T
The good news is, most small business owners know the importance of backups and many of them do it religiously. For that I commend them. That is one of the basic must-dos on your list and it should never end. The not so good part is, a large number of small to micro business owners I speak to, keep only one copy of their backups. Usually on the external drive.
Maybe it is just me, having experienced one too many backup disasters. Maybe it’s the result of having this drummed into my head by my IT mentor, but one backup can quickly and easily die on you. Not long ago, a good friend and fellow online business owner learned that the hard way. Her computer went down – no problem. She whips out her backup but alas! The backup is corrupted. Cannot be restored – basically, useless. I’ve had my fair share of those too and the feeling is absolutely devastating.
Which is why, these days, I don’t keep just one copy of backups. But wait a minute! Before you go making multiple backups, you need to know that these too may not necessarily be helpful if you are going to store them all in the same place. In other words, if you have two backups on your external drive, the drive goes dead – all your backups are gone. Having one copy on Drive A and another copy on Drive B is better but still…
What happens if there is a natural disaster and you lose everything in your home and subsequently your home office?
Awww come on Lynette! That’s a lot of speculation. You can’t live on assumptions. Maybe not, but I’ve witnessed the realization of these fears too often. One of the best and most unfortunate example is what happened during hurricane Katrina or the Tsunami that wrecked South East Asia and beyond.
No one could have anticipated the extent of damage and it can all happen in a blink of an eye. Which is why I do keep a copy of my backups at home, but there’s also a copy on third party servers. To be exact, I use Mozy. How will this help?
Well, if anything happened to my home – touch wood and says a little prayer – I won’t be dead in the water. I could purchase a new computer, order the backup or restore it directly from Mozy servers and be back in business in a day or two. That’s how and that’s what keeps me a loyal Mozy user. You don’t have to use Mozy though they are great. There are other services like Carbonite. The point is to have an off-location backup on hand. It can really save you from complete loss.
Lynette enjoys discovering new ways to use technology or new technologies to use in a business and in turn help her clients apply them. You can find also Lynette at her blog, Twitter and Facebook
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Do you have a back up program that has worked great for you? I am new to blogging and have found that I really need to buy a program but dont know where to begin. I use Liquid Web which I think is one form of back up but I dont have anything for my home computer right now.
Lucy
Great point. I have my computer well backed up at home with an external drive, but I haven’t started my offsite backup yet.
Hi Lucy, you don’t need any special form software to perform backups of your own computer. Your computer comes built in with it. You can set up a Scheduled Task (Start >> Control Panel >> Scheduled tasks) from your computer to run the backup utility on it’s on regularly. While it works, I have also found this rather unreliable and the backup files then to get corrupted regularly. So I use a program called Syncback SE to copy files and folders I would like to keep to my external drive regularly. Then in addition I also have Mozy.
Lynette–
Another alternative to offsite backups is the ioSafe Solo (they’re actually my client). Their external hard drives are waterproof and fireproof, so natural disasters aren’t an issue. And they guarantee the retrieval of their data!
Check out ioSafe here: http://www.iosafe.com/4
Hi Susan, good suggestion. I have seen ioSafe before but I will still use an offsite backup. Here’s why. When there is flooding, depending on the situation, sometimes the waters do not stay put. It can be swift moving water. Which means, your property could be swept away. If you can’t physically find the drive, you can’t retrieve the data even if it is ‘disaster proof’
Does it show I live in hurricane zone? Yeah. I think of these things a wee bit too much.
There’s another reason to keep multiple back-ups. If you back up at different point of time, when something messes up, you can go back and compare the back-ups. Sometimes you can pin-point what’s causing problems from the comparison.
@Kelvin Kao: Great point! Thanks for bringing it up.
Another reason to have off site back ups FOR ALL DOCUMENTS is fire. Thousands of people discovered this the hard way here in Victoria in February. You are unlikely to grab your hard drive on the way out the door! But more to the point, businesses lost all their docmentation, historical societies all their records and schools all their records. After the events of earlier this year, Australians can give you a large number of reasons to have multiple backups.
Hey Bernadette. Agreed whole heartedly. Last week, we had an unusually heavy downpour in town. This was without any hurricane over us. The whole town flooded, homes and businesses. It was not bad like loss of life and untold disaster but even an inch of water can be very damaging. That was a big wake up call.
Thanks for the info.
Lucy