Here's a topic that gets us techies clucking whenever it comes up. Those of us that serve small businesses play a game of who has the better horror story. By far, my favorite (because it didn't happen to me or one of our clients) was the one about the company that had to spend $10,000 to replace all the essential business data lost to drive failure. There was complicated and expensive low level hard drive data retrieval involved. I still get goose bumps. That terrifying tale is closely followed by the company that had to pay two extra full time employees for four weeks of data entry to replace the database information they lost at the errant stroke of a key. Neither of these companies had a backup plan of course. Are you shivering yet?

The simple fact is that backing the systems is not only simple, inexpensive and essential, it can and will save you thousands of dollars and hundreds of man hours when the inevitably unexpected happens. The options go from buying the hardware to saving it through an on-line service, or cloud backup. The benefit of any on-line service is it fits nicely into a disaster recovery plan as well. See, when a system is backed up to tape and the tape is stored within arm's reach of the system, that does nothing for you should something unforeseen happen to the office in which the systems reside. With both system and tape gone, you no longer have a business. Plus, on-line backup services are automated and verified by someone else, one less thing for you to worry about.



End of story, while hindsight is 20/20 a little foresight goes a lot further and feels so much better too. Back up the systems to tape, to external drive, or through on-line service. Just get it done, before not doing so does you in.

Do you have a backup horror story of your own? What are you doing to backup your data today?