April 2008 - Issue No. 12  

4 Strong Reasons to Back Up Your Data: 

Although it is becoming easier to store your data on a PC or laptop, keeping crucial documents in one place means you are in constant danger of losing all your data in the blink of an eye. Under new laws, you can even face jail time if you lose crucial data that is required for your company’s daily operations.

1. Data loss is painful, costly and in many occasions irreversible. Hard drives crash, laptops get stolen, and people delete things in error. Forget for a second about your music or favorite videos; what about financial documents, college term papers, digital photos, scanned documents and other critical documentation? Without a reliable backup they could be gone, and most likely for good.

2. Viruses, worms, malware, spyware, you name it, are a constant threat. Many years ago our main concern was hardware failure. Now there are malicious codes that can break through your system. No virus scanner claims to be 100% effective against these threats, and a lot of stolen identity happens as a result of them attacking your system. Some of these threats can render data unusable. A reliable backup is a good way to protect your data against these threats.

3. Restoring data after a loss very often involves an inordinate amount of time and money. A good backup strategy involves in retrieving your data in one piece. There are professional data recovery services that may be able to salvage data from a failed or corrupted hard disk; however, the cost of these services often run into the hundreds of even thousands of dollars and the recovery of your data is not guaranteed.

4. Do not take for granted this is not going to happen to you. Flood, fires, earthquakes, or any other disaster are not pleasant things to think about but you need to be aware how important is to use an offsite backup. At least this is one less thing to worry about.

Now that you know how important it is to backup your data, you need to find a simple way to make it happen. You can use direct-attached external hard drives, network-attached storage drives, and backup software to help you locate and schedule your files and you need to determine if you should use employ password-protection and strong encryption to keep your data out of the wrong hands in case your drive is lost or stolen.

If you are unable to determine a good backup strategy for your company, please feel free to contact us for more information on disaster recovery and backup practices.