Good Grapevine
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New business owners have a lot of worries to keep them tossing and turning at night into the wee hours. One technology ‘what if’ is the loss of critical data to a server crash, virus, hard drive failure or a larger mishap such as a fire or flood.

Even though the threat of data loss is quite apparent to many business owners sorting out a disaster recovery plan are often very low down on the list despite its importance. Sadly effective data backup protocols are often ignored even though at the lowest level important documents could be backed up onto a pen drive or USB memory stick.

Sure, even memory sticks fail but at least USB memory data recovery is a viable option as a simple form of data backup

Even burning files to CD or DVD and storing them in a separate location such as a managers or directors house or even just away for the computer you are backing up is better than no policy at all, but you then need to make sure that you stick to the routine.

One of the commonest mistakes in data backup is of course not to test your back up data to ensure that it is retrievable. This may sound strange but it is very necessary as many business have found out at huge cost that although a backup was being made it had not been successful.

With this in mind it will be far more cost effective to test your backup up before a disaster rather than finding out you cannot recovery from it and requiring a data recovery. As well as this meaning that your systems will be down for a few days it will also cost you hundreds if not thousands.

Generally speaking most small businesses will not think about backup solutions until it is too late and they have lost their data.

As well as back up to external media offsite storage is also an option, however this methodology can be quite time consuming as data needs to be uploaded or downloaded en-masse which is very time consuming and consumes a lot of bandwidth.

Another option which is relatively new is an automatic real time backup using the internet. This consists of a program running in the background backing up data as you are working. This means you do not have to remember to backup up at regular intervals as it does it all for you once it is set up.

Online data backup is becoming a very favourable option for savvy IT professionals and local computer repair companies.

Another benefit for this is if your computer/laptop gets stolen you will have a backup of all your data.

The most important take away from all this is of course if you don’t have a data backup solution in your business get one before it is too late, and once you have one test it to ensure it functions correctly.

And of course an effective backup policy is far less costly than the costs of disaster recovery and data recovery .