Running a small business can generate a lot of data. The emails you send and receive, financial transactions such as invoices and recorded expenses, working files such as documents and spreadsheets and possibly pictures you have taken of previous work done can all be very important to your business. What if you were told that you had just lost all electronic information about your business?

Various research suggests that only 25% of small and medium businesses actually backup their information although 80% conceded that they would not be able to carry on without it. As a computer ages it is more likely that the information stored on it could be in jeopardy. It can be financially tough to start a business so many are started on older computers because they are easily available.

Setting up an automated backup process for a small business computer can take as little as 15 minutes and there are various software packages out there that can be used to make the process much easier, Allway Sync Backup Solution is highly recommended. When setting up your backup software to run there are a few things you need to consider.

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How often do you need to backup your information?

If you were to lose all your information 10 minutes before your next backup, how far back would you be willing to go to rework it? This answer will be different for each scenario, but be honest with yourself. Backups can take between 10 minutes and 1 hour so having a backup done every 5 minutes is unrealistic. For many small businesses a backup at the end of the day is beneficial  so that if any information is lost it would only have to be reworked from what was done since the beginning of the day.

What are you going to backup your information to?

Depending on the amount and types of information you may chose to backup to a DVD, USB drive, external hard drive, online storage or any combination of the latter. DVDs are nice if you have a small amount of information so you have a separate DVD for each backup. However needing to be organized as they accumulate can be time consuming. USB drives are nice for a small amount of information and portability and price are a benefit. External hard drives can store a tremendous amount of information. Although their cost continues to drop, they are not as portable as other options.

What information needs to be saved?

You don’t need to save your programs, because they are stored on the disk that you installed them from. If the software was acquired digitally find out if it can be downloaded at a later date for free and if not you should make a copy onto a disk for that purpose. Data files created by these programs need to be saved. A good practice is to save everything that you create in your Documents folder (or pictures / videos depending on what you need). By having everything in a smaller amount of folders it will be easier to backup.

Where should I keep my backups?

Keeping your backups on a shelf above the computer is very handy if the computer stops working but not so helpfull in case of fire. Hopefully fire isn’t as likely to happen so a balance of off-site (away from the building your business is in) and on-site backups are the way to go. If your business is in the home ask a relative or good friend if you can drop off a backup every once in a while. It would be a good opportunity to keep in touch!

Test your backups

Many people go years in creating backups and when the backup is needed they find out that they have been backing up a blank disk. Every once in a while take your backup to a different computer and test your backup by trying to recover something you have recently been working on.

Now what if your computer goes down and were told that you had just lost all electronic information about your business?  No sweat, you have a backup solution that works!

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