Pt 1 – Keeping it safe.

Am I boring you yet? Well let me ask you a couple of questions….

Q. Do you use a computer to help you run your business?

Q. Do you rely on a computer to help you run your business?

Q. Do you store information on the computer that would be difficult or take time to reproduce from a paper copy? Do you even have a paper copy?

Q. Would you loose your accounts, orders, payroll or other financial / legal documents if a file got deleted by mistake, or the computer gets stolen or killed by flood?

Stay with me for another couple of questions……These ones will really hit home.

Q. How much would it cost your business in delayed order or invoicing?

Q How much time would you or your staff need to spend recovering or re-creating the data you have lost. What would the wage bill for that be?

Q. Would your insurance company cover the costs or tell you to take a hike?

Are you still here? Most people will have fallen asleep by now. The good news is that you are one of the few who are half way to saving themselves from utter heartbreak when your hard drive dies, computer gets stolen or is damaged in a fire. The next step I very simple.

There are people, I am one of them, that subscribe to the 3 -2 -1 principle of backing up information. The mind set behind 3 - 2 -1 says that your information does not really exist until there are three separate copies of it. These should be on at least two different types of media (a hard drive and a DVD for example), and that one copy must be removed from the building and stored offsite. What a faf!

A backup policy is only worth while if you remember to actually make copies of the data, update them and rotate the copy that is stored off site. Wouldn’t it be better if all this happened automatically without you needing to bother about it until you needed to restore some data?

Let me introduce you to Carbonite ™®, a service that we have been using for over two years.

For as little as $54.95 a year per computer (Approximately £35.00 and cheaper if you sign up for multiple years) all of your documents will be automatically "backed up" to a secure data centre on the Internet. As soon as you have saved an edited document, or created a new spreadsheet Carbonite will whisk a secure copy of it off to the Carbonite servers over a secure Internet connection. You don’t need to do anything, just have your computer turned on and connected to the Internet.

If you need to recover a file, no problem, just launch the Carbonite control panel, find the file and click “Restore”.

I have almost finished preaching but before I go think about this:

“It is easy to replace you computer. You can buy a cheap one in Tescos if its an emergency, You can re-buy or install the software from the original install discs. How will you recover the most precious bit, Your Data?”

It will take you minutes to install the small piece of Carbonite software from their website and the cost can be written off against tax. What do you have to loose….only your data if you fail to back up.

Follow this like to the Carbonite website. http://www.carbonite.co.uk/ or if you don’t fancy Carbonite then hava a look at Mozy http://mozy.co.uk/ instead.

Next Time: Pt 2 – Don’t catch a bug.