Your customer data is a precious resource that can literally be worth its weight in gold! If used properly, it can be repeatedly mined for additional sales and referrals. Do you use this gold mine to increase the profitability of your business?
You should! It can mean the difference between business survival and failure.
Why then do so few business owners take the time to ensure that it is adequately protected? Are we too busy? Perhaps you just did not know how to protect it, or could not afford the software and hardware required to back up your data correctly. Ask yourself these questions:
Is there anything more important to my business than my customer data? What would happen to my business if I were to loose all of my data?
Consider this common scenario. A client calls frantic that she would loose her business if she could not recover her customer data. She had over five years of information on her computer when the hard drive decided to make her life interesting.
So what are her choices? Renter the data manually, if she has any hard copies available. Call everyone and ask for his or her contact information again, will not that make him or her feel secure about your company. Alternatively, you could call a data recovery technician. Their services can start at a thousand dollars and go up rapidly from there!
Windows XP provides a fully functional backup utility, free! In fact, many of the commercial backup products use this backup to save the data. All you are paying for is the user interface, the window into which you enter information.
Before you run the setup wizard, you need to answer a few questions.
What data do I need to backup?
Only backup data that is necessary. Use the KISS (Keep It Simple Silly) method. Your customer database and correspondence should be backed up as a minimum.
How often do I want to back up my data?
How often does your customer data change? Does a significant amount of data change on a daily basis? Weekly?
Where do I want to store my data backup?
Most data backups still use a tape drive to store the data. The problem is that they cost a fortune! The tapes alone are expensive. Alternatives are to store your data backup on another computer on your network or copy it to a CD or DVD writable disk.
Ok, so you want to backup your data. What now? Before we do that review the information below:
Full Backup Copies and stores a complete duplicate of your data every time it runs. Takes the most time to run and the most storage space. Quickest data recovery feature. Easiest!
Incremental Backup Copies and stores only data changed since the last backup. Must be combined with a full backup, and any other incremental backups. Most complicated.
Deferential Backup Copies and stores data changed since the last full backup. Must be combined with a full backup and the last deferential backup. Middle of the road.
If you have a relatively small amount of data, I would suggest a daily full backup. If you have a larger amount of data, you might combine the full backup with a deferential backup. Simple huh?
The next question is how to store the data backup. Even though it takes a little extra work, I have my clients back their data up to a DVD writable disk. First, set the wizard to back the data up to a folder. Usually this folder is on another computer. Then burn this data to a DVD burner and place the disk it in a secure location for retrieval as necessary.
If you do not feel comfortable setting this up yourself, any competent PC technician can do it for you.
Whether you do the setup yourself or have it setup by a professional technician you are taking the first step in ensuring the long-term survival of your business. Please take the time to do this.
Ultimately your customers do not care how or why you lost their information, they just care that you did. I will leave you with this statistic:
Estimates suggest that 80% of small businesses that suffer a serious computer failure cease trading within two years. Will yours be one of them?
We all know we have to backup regularly, but those backups files can get huge. Add that to your existing your files and your notebook computer hard drive seems to have shrunk overnight. No matter what size hard drive you have on your notebook computer, space is a premium. Besides, it's not exactly a good idea to store your backups on the same hard drive since you can't retrieve it -- rather defeats the purpose of backing up don't you think? So what do you do, what are your options?
Backup to an external hard drive. This is probably the quickest, most cost effective option. You can often get a removable drive on sale or with rebate for a low price too. You can get one with hundreds of Gigabytes of space too. They can be easy to hookup to your notebook computer. However, do remember that they are hard drives and hard drives can fail. You may find the external backup fails before your notebook computer does.
Online backup. This is actually a good idea because physical disasters can happen to your home. And when that happens, you will always have a copy in a place not affected by the disaster. This is why businesses usually have one backup in the premises and one (or more) off premises. The good thing about online backup is, it's accessible from anywhere with an internet connection. So if your notebook fails when you're away from home, you can still retrieve your data.
Many of these services are reasonably priced and they provide you with everything you need to get the backups safely transfered. But because your data will be on someone else's system, choose a reputable company, one who is not only established but takes customer data confidentiality very seriously.
Network attached storage. This would make more sense if you have several computers. They allow you to not only backup several computers' data into one location but also ability to share or retrieve files from that central area. You can also achieve a similar effect equipping an older computer with a large hard drive and use it just for storage or backup.
Backup to CD or DVD. This is considered the safest for long term data integrity. External drives and network storage can still crash and prone to virusses. CD's and DVD's are also inexpensive. But backing up to disks daily is chore as you'll find yourself having to manually pop in the disks. It becomes even more hard work when you have a lot of files and your backup spans several disks. The other problem with this method is, backup utilities that come with your operating system cannot backup to a CD or DVD drive. So you'll have to fork out extra cash to buy a third party backup software that will.
No backup solution is one hundred percent and what you choose of course will depend on how you work. If your data is really important to you, try not rely on one backup source. Create two separate sources if you can afford to, just in case.
