Importance Of Having A Company Backup Plan
Are you taking the appropriate measures to protect your company? Backing up your company’s data may seem like an afterthought compared to increasing revenue or marketing for a small business. But in times of disaster, a Computer Backup Plan, an insurance plan, is extremely crucial to help protect your organization’s assets. That means the operating system, registry, programs, and data on your computer.
Why Is Having A Computer Back Up Plan Important?
Important files are accidentally deleted all the time. Mission-critical data can become corrupt. Natural disasters can leave your office in ruin. With a solid backup and recovery plan, you can recover from any of these. Without one, you are left with nothing to fall back on.
What Are Some Eventualities That Can Threaten Your Business?
Having a backup can be very beneficial; especially in times of a catastrophe. Consider that if the IRS audits you, accurate records are necessary. Some of the major eventualities that can lead to the disruption or failure of your business are:
- Severe weather
- Supply disruptions caused by:
- Bad weather in port cities or at distribution terminals
- Transportation strikes
- High fuel prices or fuel shortages
- Key Staff Depletion (i.e. severe seasonal illness)
- Denial of access to your premises
- Fires
- Hazardous waste spills
- Gas leaks
- Flooding
- Natural catastrophes
- Man-made catastrophes
- Utility disruption
- Electric
- Telephone
- Gas
- Internet
- Computer hardware crash
- Key production equipment malfunction
Please see Article Benefits Of Having A Business Continuity Plan for more information.
What Must You Consider To Help Create A Backup Plan?
It takes time to innovate and implement a backup plan. You’ll need to figure out what data needs to be backed up and how often the data should be backed up. To help you create a plan, you need to consider the following:
- Who will be responsible for the backup plan?
- How important is your data?
- What type of information does your data contain?
- How often does the data change?
- How quickly do you need to recover the data?
- Do you have the equipment to perform the backups?
- What is the best time to schedule backups?
- Do you need to store backups off-site?
What Are The Basic Types Of Backups You Can Perform?
In your backup plan it is recommended that you perform full backups on a weekly basis and supplement this with daily, differential, or incremental backups. Creating an extended backup, a backup consisting of additional files, set for monthly and quarterly backups is very beneficial too.
- Normal/Full Backups
- Copy Backups
- Differential Backups
- Incremental Backups
- Daily Backups
What Backup Plans Can You Utilize?
The External Hard Drive Plan
Buying an External Hard Drive, a physical hard drive that stores data from your computer’s hard drive via transfer, is a basic way of creating a backup for data. Essentially, you have another hard drive outside of your computer onto which you can connect to any computer and copy or draw the files of your choice. This transferring can be done in two ways:
- The manual way
- This is done by dragging individual files and or folders to the external drive when it is plugged into your computer. This is the easiest way to back up your data to an external hard drive. However it can also be time consuming.
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Creating a Disk Image (a single file or storage device containing the complete contents and structure representing a data storage device). This will automatically save any files or changes you make twice. Once on your hard drive on the computer and the other to the external. A replica of the hard drive from your computer will be created by creating a disk image. Some of the nifty programs that can be used to create a disk image are:
- Time Machine
- SuperDuper
- Carbon Copy Cloner
- Acronis True Image
- Dropbox
Note: It is recommended that in case of a disaster (fire, theft, etc.), that external hard drives are placed somewhere secure.
The Online Data Back Up Plan
Cloud Computing, the use of computing resources (hardware and software) that are delivered as a service over a network, is very beneficial because you can easily access your data from location that shares your networking preferences. Also, the likelihood of being dependent on your computer and the physical external hard drive decreases. All cloud-based backup services include a few basic elements:
- A client program that runs on your computer
- An encrypted connection to and from the Internet
- Secure online storage.
Generally, in a typical cloud-based backup situation you install the backup client, log into the service, choose your options and select what to back up. Then the program will run in the background, transmitting files over the encrypted Internet connection to secure online storage.
Some online services that allow you to upload your data to a secure server are:
- Carbonite Online Backup
- Mozy Home
- Acronis Online Backup
- IDrive
- SugarSync
- BackBlaze
- CrashPlan+
- UpdateStar
Unlike backup to local drives, cloud-based backup can often take several days to complete. The performance of the backup is affected by:
- The upload speed of your Internet connection
- The priority you assign to the backup task – some backup clients allow you to specify the priority of the backup process, or even allow you to specify different priorities based on when the backup process is taking place.
Note: Cloud-based backup services cannot provide disaster recovery image backups, because they are designed only to back up data files or other files that you specify. It is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED that you choose a program that works for disaster recovery as well.
Is Your Business Secure?
Keeping your computers protected from Viruses, Malware, Spyware, and Adware helps your businesses run efficiently. Please see Article Small Business Information Security Management for more information.
Did you know?
IT IS VERY IMPORTANT TO KEEP YOUR TECHNOLOGY UP TO DATE. IT WILL COST YOU LESS, KEEP YOUR BUSINESS SECURE, AND INCREASE PRODUCTIVITY! Yes, using outdated computers and software seems less costly in the short run. To play devil’s advocate, it would be very hard to operate your business efficiently and extremely expensive in the long run. The costs to constantly repair outdated technology and manage your backups are overwhelming because the outdated technology no longer exists in modern times. It is especially time consuming to work with outdated technology and to switch over to modern machines and software. Data loss is a huge possibility which can deeply wound your business. If you were to attempt to switch over to modern machines, it would cost more money and slow down your business.
Glossary
- Cloud Computing: This is the use of computing resources, be it hardware and or software, that are delivered as a service over a network (typically the internet).
- Computer Back Up Plan: The multiple ways in which you can back up files, photos, and financial data.
- Copy Backups: All files that have been selected are backed up, regardless of the setting of the archive attribute. Unlike a normal backup, the archive attribute on files isn’t modified. This allows you to perform other types of backups on the files at a later date.
- Daily Backups: Designed to back up files using the modification date on the file itself. If a file has been modified on the same day as the backup, the file will be backed up. This technique doesn’t change the archive attributes of files.
- Differential Backups: Designed to create backup copies of files that have changed since the last normal backup. The presence of the archive attribute indicates that the file has been modified and only files with this attribute are backed up. However, the archive attribute on files isn’t modified. This allows you to perform other types of backups on the files at a later date.
- Disk Image: A single file or storage device containing the complete contents and structure representing a data storage device.
- Drivers: Small programs that allow hardware to work.
- External Hard Drive: Physical hard drive that can store data from your computer’s hard drive via transfer.
- Incremental Backups: Designed to create backups of files that have changed since the most recent normal or incremental backup. The presence of the archive attribute indicates that the file has been modified and only files with this attribute are backed up. When a file is backed up, the archive attribute is cleared. If the file is later modified, this attribute is set, which indicates that the file needs to be backed up.
- Normal/Full Backups: All files that have been selected are backed up, regardless of the setting of the archive attribute. When a file is backed up, the archive attribute is cleared. If the file is later modified, this attribute is set, which indicates that the file needs to be backed up.
