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If you want to run a successful business in 2018, chances are you’ll be looking to embrace technology. Technological advances have brought us from computers that take an entire room to store to tiny handheld devices within 80 years, and its revolutionised the way we do business. You probably take for granted your ability to store data about your clients, your staff and all of your company finances – you might even have your own server dedicated solely to your office and maintaining all of your critical files somewhere safe and close by. Though technology is regularly doing incredible things for us, it’s also still shockingly easy for our devices to crash and erase years of work. Ranging from natural disasters like fires and floods to human error with an accidental file deletion, your server is not infallible and recovering your data after it has stopped working can be very costly.

The amount of tiny interconnected pieces of machinery that come together to store your terabytes of information is mind-boggling, and something as simple as a dropped computer tower could cause serious issues for your business. Hard drives can be plagued by an array of software and hardware issues from head crashes, where your read and write heads malfunction and render your sensitive data an unreadable mess, to water damage from a natural disaster like a flood or leak. The worst part is that no company can ever completely guarantee a full recovery of every important file that you were holding on to.

How to back up

So what can you do to guard against data recovery issues before they even happen? The best and most simple answer is to create and maintain a full back-up of your data – and it couldn’t be more simple. We recommend using more than one type of backup, because sometimes one can be wiped out along with the original copy and nothing could be more frustrating than that! There are many overly complicated guides and how-to’s online that recommend you use their specific brand of software, but the simplest ways can sometimes be the best. You should create a physical backup of your businesses important data by storing copies of your files on hard drives, tape drives or any kind of storage device connected to your network. You can make several of these and store one of them offsite so that the risk of something happening in your office and you losing absolutely everything is mitigated.

You should create a second, remote back up by utilising the cloud, which you probably already use to an extent for running some of your systems and software over the internet. Backing up to the cloud means you have another copy of your data secured offsite but this copy can be accessed remotely using just an internet connection. It effectively travels with you wherever you go and adds an extra layer of protection when used in conjunction with a physical copy.

The typical way to maintain a backup system is by creating your initial backups of all the data you want to keep safe, and then monitoring and updating that copy when things change. It’s up to you what data that is, or how regularly it’s updated, but at the very least you should duplicated the information that you need to keep your business running on a daily basis. We know that for some people, this guide may have come a little too late and they may have already lost valuable data – but moving forward you can avoid this pain by following the two simple backup strategies. Until then, give us a call and we can recover what you’ve lost