When was the last time you backed up your business? 

We never cease to be amazed by the number of businesses who deal with staggering amounts of data every day that doesn’t back up their systems. It’s one of those miscellaneous IT issues that they know they should be doing, but don’t. But having a backup system in lace doesn’t just protect your business – it could save it.

What Is A Backup?

Backing up your data is a very simple concept. All you are doing is making a copy of all of the data on your machine – files, application data, system status, emails – and storing them somewhere else. The essential aspect of backup is to do it regularly and store your backups at a remote location. These copies can be stored in a variety of ways, including external hard drives, USB sticks, NAS drives, off-site servers and The Cloud. If something should go wrong with your computer systems, you can start again and restore everything from the backups. Backups of your data not only give you peace of mind, but they save you money in extra costs, time spent fixing computers, lost revenue from downtime and potentially even your business itself.

How Will This Help My Business?

Say one day you come into work to find there has been a leak in your office building. Overnight a water pipe – the one that runs above your office- burst, and water has been flooding the building. The leak has stopped, but your office and everything in it is ruined. With the computers and servers fried, how will you possibly get your business back up and running? There are 2 types of business owner here. The first falls to his knees and weeps – knowing that he has no copies of anything and nowhere to start from – his business will never re-open after this accident. The other kind however, while being annoyed about the situation, can relax (as much as possible). He can buy some new computers and get his systems and files downloaded and installed by the IT company who takes care of his backups (at a remote location). At worst, his business is down for a few days while everything sorts itself out. Even so, he has access to the backups remotely, so he can at least maintain contact with customers and let them know what’s going on. That’s just one, rather extreme, example. Other situations where backups helping rescue your business include data corruption, theft, loss, and upgrades.

Why Should I Backup Regularly?

Every single day the data within your business changes. Your files and systems will never be the same as they are today, or how they will be tomorrow. Backing up your data will essentially be a snapshot in time from the exact moment you backed up. If you should need to use your backup, your business data would be taken back in time. If you back your data up say, once a month, then that’s the version you will be taken back to – leaving you to build everything from the last month back up. But if you back your systems up every evening outside of work hours (as we suggest), you will only lose work done during the following day, if any at all. If you come in at 9am to disaster, you have not lost any data, because the backup is of your systems from 6.30 the previous evening.

For many businesses, backups and disaster recovery are far from their minds, something to think about later. But later is often too late, which is why it’s important to get them sorted out as soon as possible. As an external IT company, we can take care of all of your backups from initiation to storage and retrieval, all without you needing to do a thing. For more information about our backup options or to talk about designing your own bespoke solutions, get in touch with one of our team for a free consultation.

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