I live on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and part of living down here is that you have to worry about the occasional hurricane. I was one of the many people who lost everything I owned to Hurricane Katrina when it washed away my beachfront apartment, so I know what it feels like to start over. If you run a small business, losing everything could very well mean the end of your business. This is why it is important to take measures to protect your data in the event of a disaster like a hurricane.
Backups are Necessary for Business
You simply must make the act of backing up data a regular action in your business. Either by using high capacity tape drives or even a CD or DVD burner, you must back up your files. You can encourage individual users to do the same thing on their own computers, though it is still better for them to keep important files stored on a centralized server. If connectivity is an issue, CD or DVD burners are helpful, as are flash drives. You can now get multiple gigabyte capacity flash drives for very cheap. One of the quickest ways to back up data is to email it to a web-based account like Gmail or Hotmail. Although this doesn’t work well for large amounts of data, it is a great and quick method of securing a few files or bits of information.
Backing up the data on your servers and hard drives isn’t enough. The problem comes down to the uneducated end user who may not even know where their files are stored. I’ve worked in IT for going on ten years now, and I can’t tell you how many people think their Office documents are saved ‘in Word’ or ‘in Excel’ and then have problems finding stuff. This isn’t the fault of the user, but rather just a training issue that could easily be resolved with a bit of instruction on Windows file structure and navigation.
Important Reasons for Backing Up Using Different Methods
In my past experience, I’ve heard plenty of whining and complaints about people that lost data, and almost every time it was because they had stored something just on a hard drive and nowhere else. What happened was either the hard drive crashed or maybe the computer was destroyed by flood or some other disaster. Keeping important files just on your hard drive is a really bad idea because you never know when that drive might go out. I was working for a bank when Katrina hit, and we had countless people who lost important data because they never backed their files up to the server. Some people even burned things to a CD, then left that disc on their desk to be blown away with the rest of the building.
The key to preserving data is to utilize multiple locations, both physically and electronically. If you use backup tapes, don’t keep them all in a box next to your server because they won’t do you any good if the building gets six feet of water inside. If you burn files to CD or DVD, don’t leave them setting in your desk because they won’t help you when the building burns down. Just imagine if your computer suddenly were not available, then think of the best way for you to still be able to get the data you had on it.
I hope that nobody ever has to deal with a disaster recovery like we did on the Mississippi Gulf Coast following Katrina. No matter where you live, it is still good business practice to following the Boy Scout motto and be prepared.