Small Business Owners and Entrepreneurs, listen up! I recently spent the majority of a couple of days helping 
a colleague restore her data after her computer was stolen. Well, we restored as much as possible. She was not good at making regular backups. As a result she lost a significant amount of data that she will never see again.
I wanted to take this opportunity to provide a friendly reminder to make backup copies of data that you do not want to lose; and data you hold near and dear to your hearts! I know many, and perhaps most, of you have your own businesses, so you could not only be sad from losing personal files, you could also devastate your business if you do not make regular backups. I’d hate to hear if some of you lost time, money and customers as a result of not having backup copies.
Some important files to backup that are often overlooked include:
- Tax returns
- Customer files, including order histories as applicable
- Photos
- MP3’s, including your music files (I’d cry if I lost my hundreds of iTunes songs)
- Address files
- Phone lists
- Application files (e.g., Word, Excel, Viso, etc.)
- Invoices
- Stored cell phone numbers and messages
- Etc…anything important to you
Be sure to create more than one backup. For example, do not keep making your backups onto the same filename on an external hard drive, on the same USB drive, DVD, etc. If your backup media is damaged, then your data on the backup may not be able to be retrieved.
Which brings me to the next point…store your important backups somewhere safe! For your personal backups, a fireproof safe in your home *may* be okay, but preferably, store your backups off site in a secured location such as a bank deposit box.
And make your backups regularly… I recommend making it a weekly event. It is amazing how many important files you can lose over just a week’s amount of time! And if you have something extremely important, make a backup of it right away.
If you use online services to backup your data, let us know which services you love! Let’s promote what works!
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I happen to be partial to Mozy. After my hard restore incident, its nice to know that I can just set it up, forget it , and it backs up daily.
I couldn’t agree with you more. My computer recently crashed and suddenly I found myself bereft of all my database, photos, etc. I thought these were all back up with Carbonite – they weren’t! I would appreciate any advice in respect of an offline backup system. Are these best or, as you say, hard disks in storage? I would welcome everyone thoughts.
Alex,
When backing stuff up, I usually use an internal hard drive and travel drives. I find that both cover all of my needs. Does that help?