heartharmony.com.au

Does your business back up every electronic file regularly (and by regularly I mean at a bare minimum weekly)?  And for those of you looking all smug – do you have off-site back-ups in case of a disaster in your property?

Last year I heard many war stories about files going missing in floods, fires, storms, burglary – as well as simple human error and virus attack. People who did back-up regularly and popped their back up drive into the safe, came back to find the safe after the fire had survived, but the back up drive had melted.

The lesson is to either back up to one of the on-line services or buy a couple of external drives and swap them around. You can pick up external systems for less than $150 – is your business worth more than $150?

Now another question – do you back up the most important piece of information in your business? Think twice before answering this one. If you produce an ezine or have some other form of web presence, and your “list” of email names is stored with another company such as AWeber, GetResponse or other third party provider, do you back up your full list weekly to your system?

Sure the third party provider does their own back-ups, but “things happen” from as simple as you forgetting to pay a bill and your account being closed to a major disaster for the third party company. You want a back up of your data on your system just in case. All internet marketers will tell you that “the money is in the list”. You can take away their whole business but as long as they have their list they will be able to keep trading. Their approach is worthwhile adopting.

While we are talking back ups – do you have your own back-up on your system of your website, blog, tweets and/or Facebook data? More core data that you need to add into your back-up cycle “In case”.

What about your cell phone data? Is that backed up regularly?

The trick with all of this is to:

(1) nominate responsibility for someone to back everything up regularly

(2) create a schedule to follow (for example – every Friday afternoon) and a list of things to back up

(3) follow up that it is being done

(4) check the quality of your back-ups periodically (there is no point having a back-up that doesn’t restore when you need it).

(5) duplicate – make sure you have more than one back-up at any given time.

I am sure there are some IT businesses who may want to chime in with their tips, or companies with war stories of not having had the back up when they needed it – love to hear them! Me … I’m off to run my weekly back-ups

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter