FILE RECOVERY
Data Backups - One Key to Business
Survival by Rick Parrott, MCP
Your customer data is a precious resource that can literally
be worth its weight in gold! If used properly, it can
be repeatedly mined for additional sales and referrals.
Do you use this gold mine to increase the profitability
of your business?
You should! It can mean the difference between business
survival and failure.
Why then do so few business owners take the time to ensure
that it is adequately protected? Are we too busy? Perhaps
you just did not know how to protect it, or could not
afford the software and hardware required to back up your
data correctly.
Ask yourself these questions:
Is there anything more important to my business than my
customer data? What would happen to my business if I were
to loose all of my data?
Consider this common scenario. A client calls frantic
that she would loose her business if she could not recover
her customer data. She had over five years of information
on her computer when the hard drive decided to make her
life interesting.
So what are her choices? Renter the data manually, if
she has any hard copies available. Call everyone and ask
for his or her contact information again, will not that
make him or her feel secure about your company. Alternatively,
you could call a data recovery technician. Their services
can start at a thousand dollars and go up rapidly from
there!
Windows XP provides a fully functional backup utility,
free! In fact, many of the commercial backup products
use this backup to save the data. All you are paying for
is the user interface, the window into which you enter
information.
Before you run the setup wizard, you need to answer
a few questions.
What data do I need to backup?
Only backup data that is necessary. Use the KISS (Keep
It Simple Silly) method. Your customer database and correspondence
should be backed up as a minimum.
How often do I want to back up my data?
How often does your customer data change? Does a significant
amount of data change on a daily basis? Weekly?
Where do I want to store my data backup?
Most data backups still use a tape drive to store the
data. The problem is that they cost a fortune! The tapes
alone are expensive. Alternatives are to store your data
backup on another computer on your network or copy it
to a CD or DVD writable disk.
Ok, so you want to backup your data. What now? Before
we do that review the table below:
Full Backup Copies and stores a complete duplicate of
your data every time it runs. Takes the most time to run
and the most storage space. Quickest data recovery feature.
Easiest!
Incremental Backup Copies and stores only data changed
since the last backup. Must be combined with a full backup,
and any other incremental backups. Most complicated.
Deferential Backup Copies and stores data changed since
the last full backup. Must be combined with a full backup
and the last deferential backup. Middle of the road.
If you have a relatively small amount of data, I would
suggest a daily full backup. If you have a larger amount
of data, you might combine the full backup with a deferential
backup. Simple huh?
The next question is how to store the data backup. Even
though it takes a little extra work, I have my clients
back their data up to a DVD writable disk. First, set
the wizard to back the data up to a folder. Usually this
folder is on another computer. Then burn this data to
a DVD burner and place the disk it in a secure location
for retrieval as necessary.
If you do not feel comfortable setting this up yourself,
any competent PC technician can do it for you. If you
want to do it yourself, click on the following link and
it will take you to a tutorial located on my website.
WINDOWS BACKUP WIZARD TUTORIAL
Whether you do the setup yourself or have it setup by
a professional technician you are taking the first step
in ensuring the long-term survival of your business. Please
take the time to do this.
Ultimately your customers do not care how or why you lost
their information, they just care that you did. I will
leave you with this statistic:
Estimates suggest that 80% of small businesses that suffer
a serious computer failure cease trading within two years.
Will yours be one of them?
About the Author
Rick Parrott, MCP - SA Secure, a San Antonio Texas company
specializing in desktop support and help desk services for small to
medium businesses. Our goal is to provide an alternative to
maintaining an expensive in-house IT staff or relying on many
different individual computer repair technicians. Visit our website:
http://www.sasecure.net
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