Tech Tips – “You did back it up, didn’t you?”
Recently a client was telling a story about a business colleague who had crippled his small business when he lost all his data due to a fire – it transpired that he never thought his equipment would fail. The story is far from unique, but it always brings home to me the number of individuals and businesses that fail to back up their data.
Now I know there are lots of stories about the need for robust Business Continuity planning, including the backing-up of vital data, hot-standby premises, replacement kit etc., but it still surprises me the number of people who have not considered even the simplest of backup regimes.
Nowadays storage is cheap – very, very cheap – there really is no excuse not to acquire a plug-in USB type device for around £50 and copy your vital data on to it and take it off-site.
Of course, as your enterprise grows, you’ll need more formalised procedures for data backup – setting up daily, weekly and monthly procedures, using local back-up methods, eg RAID disk arrays, Network Addressable Storage (NAS) and more conventional Magnetic Tape solutions.
One area that has seen significant advance is online backup solutions – vendors such as the recently launched Apple MobileMe and also BT Digital Vault to name just two, offer solutions that enable your valuable data to be uploaded via the Internet to what has become known as ‘The Cloud’. MobileMe offers the chance to use your data in many locations, too – so you can treat it both as a backup resource as well as a data distribution method to allow others to access your core information.
The bottom line is – if you don’t back it up, you’ll lose it; if you lose it, you might lose your business.
Written by Nigel Smith - Visit Website