“If you only have one copy of something, you must not care about it very much.” – That is what I tell people who don’t have backups.
Whether it’s digital data or even physical things like contracts, pictures, and car titles – you should have at least two copies of everything. Here are a few tips for making sure you are covered in the event of a digital or physical disaster.
1. Anything you create digitally should be automatically backed up. No human intervention should be required to run a backup. For me, this is very important. We humans tend to forget things at the worst times. Employees leave, training doesn’t get done, vacations and sick days happen. Keeping your data safe is critical and it should be automated. Humans should check on the system to make sure it’s working from time to time, but that’s the extent of how much people should have to be involved.
2. Anything you have physically filed away should be scanned and kept with your digital backups. Contracts, vehicle titles, licenses, and hundreds of other things are still on paper these days and losing those things in a fire can be devastating or at least time consuming to replace. You should commit to scanning every new piece of paper that comes in to your office and make a plan for scanning all the old paper. If it’s important enough to file away, then it’s important enough to scan and back up. Even if you can’t use the scan by itself (like with a vehicle title) you’ll have an inventory of everything that you need to work on replacing.
3. Backups should include an off-site copy. Having backups on a thumb drive or hard drive right next to your computer is better than nothing, but many disasters that affect your main PC will also affect that backup. Fire, lightning, flood, thieves, and most modern viruses can all destroy backups at the same time as your PC if those backups are on-site. Solutions like our Managed Backup Service keep one backup on-site, but also keep two more copies off-site for this reason.
Contact us for more information on how your business should be protected. A good backup strategy can be the difference between going out of business after a disaster and being able to rebuild.
