Data Backups ? One Key to Business Survival

Your customer data is a precious resource that can literally be worth its weight in gold! If used properly, it can be mined over and over 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 didn't know how to protect it, or couldn't 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'd loose her business if she couldn't 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 their contact information again, won't that make them feel secure about her company. Or 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, for 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 you enter information into.

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 table 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 don't feel comfortable setting this up yourself, any competent PC technician can do it for you. If you want to do it yourself, click on the following link and it'll take you to a tutorial located on my website.

WINDOWS BACKUP WIZARD TUTORIAL

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 don't care how or why you lost their information, they just care that you did. I'll 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?

Rick Parrott, MCP - SA Secure, http://www.SASecure.net, a San Antonio TX company specializing in desktop support and help desk services for small to medium businesses. Our goal is to provide an alternative to maintaining an expensive in-house IT staff or relying on many different individual computer repair technicians.

Working for fortune 500 corporations has taught us the value of continuity when it comes to your IT needs. Calling in random repair technicians does not allow for this continuity, the technician has to learn your business every time you change to another company. This causes inefficiencies in the process, which lead to higher support costs and lower reliability. We offer on-site desktop, remote telephone, network and wireless support. Need a project manager? What about end user computer training? In short everything the big corporate players enjoy we can provide for your business, at a fraction of the costs!

email: rickparrott@sasecure.net

---

3 Simple Steps To Organize Your Critical Online Home Based Business Directory

If You are running an Online Work at home Business it is very critical that you create a well organized directory structure. The Obvious advantage of an organized Directory structure is it makes... Read More

9 Things to Look for when Considering Data Backup Solutions

It's one thing to loose data and money because of hackers and thieves of various kinds; it's a different thing again when it's because you didn't back up your data properly or not... Read More

Data Recovery - What Not to Do!

Data recovery is a tricky thing, and if you've somehow deleted or had your important files corrupted or lost due to human error, business espionage, faulty hardware or software or any other reason;... Read More

Computer Data Backups: Test Now or Cry Later

If you're like most small business owners, your computer data backups are one of those things that you rarely pay attention to. Computer data backups are kind of like flossing your teeth and... Read More

How to Effectively Back Up Your Data

What to backup, and what to loseThe oldest "computer expression" is that there are two kinds of computer users, those that backup their data and those that will. Often, it takes a "data... Read More

Data Backups ? One Key to Business Survival

Your customer data is a precious resource that can literally be worth its weight in gold! If used properly, it can be mined over and over for additional sales and referrals. Do you... Read More

Data Recovery The Easy Way

If you aren't prepared in advance, you will most likely have to use a data recovery service or data recovery software solution to help get back as much as you can of what... Read More

Disaster Recovery- Managing the Risk

Helping your business survive in the event of an unforeseen disaster: Most business failures are not from bad business but from bad business practices.Most companies that fail are the ones that have not... Read More

Backup 101 - How To Pick The Right Backup Software

Vision Backup http://www.deprice.com/visionbackupenterprise.htmVision Backup 10 Enterprise is an advanced and easy-to-use backup solution, designed for scheduled backup of your mission critical data. Supported media's include CD-R/CD-RW/DVD-R/DVD-RW, FTP/SFTP/FTPS, Tape, Flash Devices and USB Hard... Read More

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery - Risk Analysis and Control

In the risk evaluation phase, there are a number of key areas that must be covered. One of the most important is to understand probable threats. In an ideal world, which most of... Read More

Backing Up Personal Computers

Backup on business computers is typically not the user's concern unless it's a small business. A business should have a policy in place for managing backups especially due to Sarbanes - Oxyley.Four options... Read More

Big Time Disaster Recovery Solutions Available for the Little Guy

There was a time - not too long ago - that Data Disaster Recovery solutions were available only in the domain of multinational corporations and big business in general. However, with the proliferation... Read More

Learn How To Make Data Backup Over The Internet!

Why should you backup your data on the Internet?There are several reasons.* The backup is located at a secure place for away from your computer. * It's is easy to do. *... Read More

The Best Data Recovery Choice For You

The best defense against a loss of data is a really solid and faithful backup routine of important files to reliable media. It's also a good idea for the media to be removable... Read More

Bill Gates Made Data Recovery Easy

Bill gates provided a ready made option in Microsoft windows, which is very useful for data recovery.Several time we make mistakes unknowingly and we lost our data, then we need to recover the... Read More

Are The Words Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning Rolling Off Your Lips?

It might be more fun to talk about those free online business cards that are saving the company money, or those nifty designer business checks that are helping to solidif your branding efforts... Read More

When Disaster Strikes: How Long Would Your Business Survive if Files On Your Computer Disappeared?

A Tornado? In Birmingham? In The United Kingdom? Unthinkable!Yes, in July 2005 (while I was putting finishing touches to my cave-house in Spain) my house, along with many of my neighbours' houses was... Read More

5 RAID Data Recovery Prevention Tips

If you have spent the time to increase your computer's performance by setting up a hardware RAID array, you owe it to yourself to invest a little extra time and effort in maintaining... Read More

Want To Beat The Odds? Disaster Recovery Planning is Essential

Statistics show two out of five businesses go out of business within five years of experiencing a major disaster.These statistics are staggering. Even if the business survives the initial attack or natural disaster,... Read More

5 Simple Tips to Prevent MS Access Database Corruption

It's important to understand that any time an Access client disconnects unexpectedly, it may set a "corruption flag" in the .mdb file indicating that the database is in a corrupt state (regardless of... Read More

Avoiding Hard Disk Data Recovery Services

As a home computer owner, one of the greatest threats to your information and to your wallet, is hard disk failure. When your drive crashes, you will quicky realize how valuable the information... Read More

The Importance of Data Backups

All computers and their components are subject to failure. In fact sooner or later every business will be confronted with some type of computer failure. The largest threat to businesses during a failure... Read More

How To Use Spyware Elimination Software

Spyware elimination software is designed to detect and eliminate spyware. A large number of spyware elimination software products are available. Some of them are available as freeware and some as shareware. Shareware can... Read More

The Importance Of Email Backup

Viruses, software failures, power failures, human errors, hard drive failures are only a few examples of what could destroy the data on a hard drive, including all documents, pictures, emails and other files!Most... Read More

Data Backup Solution: Why You Need a Backup Plan in Place ? Part 1

Is a data backup solution part of your computer plans? Do you have a way to protect yourself if something goes wrong with your computer or data? Computers are a useful part of... Read More

Read This Now: Its Not If You Will Lose Your Data, Its When Will You Lose Your Data

With Adware, SpyWare, E-Mail Viruses, Java Script Viruses and Hardware failures It isn't a matter of If you will loose your Data it is a matter of When you will loose your Data!... Read More

How To Limit Hard Drive Data Recovery Costs

With the value on information rising day by day, one of the greatest threats to businesses of any size is data loss. If the data centers in your business have ever experienced a... Read More

Data Recovery Processes

Six months ago my computer crashed. When I turned my computer on it would not load Windows XP and so I could not get into my two hard drive files. As an author... Read More

Data Recovery - You Can Get It Back!

Data recovery is a process whereby you can save data and files you accidentally deleted, had eaten by malicious software or viruses, hardware failures, corporate espionage and many more scenarios. Most people believe... Read More