Whether you realize it or not, backing up files is an important piece of your business. From computer-based companies to those whose only use a desktop for bookkeeping, if your data is lost then your business is as well.
Let’s look at a scenario of what could happen without proper backup solutions.
Let’s say you own a business. You and your employees use computers everyday and supply your business with everything it needs: productivity is up and business is good. One day, one of your employees comes up to you looking upset. He says that he accidentally deleted a folder containing all of this month’s sales information. Not good for him, but worse for you. Then you realize that the company has a backup in place for just this type of problem. So, off you go to recover the deleted file and you see an error message indicating that the data has been corrupted. No matter what you try, you can’t get the backup that you trusted to do just that: there is no file to recover. You start to sweat.
Unfortunately, the above scenario happens more often than one would think.
Our example business owner was forward thinking, but he’s not an IT professional. While one backup is better than nothing, many things can go wrong at any time. There’s a saying in the IT industry, “Data that isn’t backed up more than twice is data you don’t care about.” Sometimes, even having multiple backups isn’t enough. What if a disgruntled employee uses his knowledge of the business to sabotage all of the data and every backup? Or what if a fire destroys the building? These are just a few of the situations that IT Professionals have in mind when designing backup solutions.
An easy solution to the above dramatic situations would be an off-site backup.
This is simply a copy of all important data which goes off-site with a trusted employee or business owner. If something were to happen to the business or its data on-site, the off-site data would be safe at home waiting to be accessed. This is only as reliable as that location is secure and as up to date as that copy of the backup. What if that backup failed? If you think that is unlikely, you would be right, but so is having an accidental deletion of files, a fire destroy the business, or an employee sabotage the files. Accidents happen in the best run businesses, as do fires, and angry employees. And what if any of this happens to you?
This scenario isn’t intended to scare you but instead educate you on the potential issues which may arise.
Getting the proper professional-grade backup solution is important. In fact, it may be the most important asset of any business. A professionally configured and managed backup solution includes multiple and off-site backups, and may even extend to backup over the cloud, monitoring and testing backups for errors, and archiving out-of-date backups.
Ultimately, backups are necessary for every business and finding your company’s best solution is where True Blue can take responsibility for the integrity of your data and will give you peace of mind. Here’s our cheat sheet on backing up data.