On your Top 10 list of things you don’t want to experience for your small business is a serious computer problem.  Viruses are one bad thing, but even worse is the loss of your data through by having your computer or your network crash.  And for any business, large or small, losing data and records can be expensive and oh, so damaging to the life of the business.

Sure, you’ve heard it all before: YOU MUST BACK UP YOUR DATA.  Simply put, prevention is the key.  Having your computer records backed up could save your business in the terrible event that your computer drive, server, or network crashes and burns.

When your computer system is working well, life is grand.  When it starts to mess up, things can get ugly fast.  A good backup system can relieve tension and anxiety when things are slightly bad, and can save your business in the case of a disastrous event.

And disaster planning is no small effort. Large businesses can more easily afford backup systems, redundancy, and strong preventative measures.  For the smaller companies, particularly those without their own Information Technology department, there are options. You have many choices to consider when investigating what backup system to use, and obviously cost is a big factor.

Comprehensive disaster recovery planning covers a wide range of topics (losses due to fires, earthquakes, floods, and the impacts of such disasters on staffing, operations, customer base, etc.), and most of these disasters are likely to involve the circumstance where your data has been lost.  And the circumstance of losing data, or more appropriately preventing the loss of data, is what we’re addressing here.

Data backup and recovery is all about finding efficient ways to duplicate your data and put it somewhere safe.  To do that you need to understand costs, and needs for hardware, networking, software, and management costs. 

Most backup systems depend on a network to transport your data from your physical location to some other storage system at a different site.  If you backup your data and park it in the store room, it won’t be very useful if your building burns or is closed due to some other emergency. 

In the old days, data was transferred to big tape systems that were physically loaded on to a truck and stored in a climate controlled facility nearby.  But things are different now: we live in a network world where virtualized transport and storage facilities become more complex rapidly.  But the growth in complexity gives you, as a small business owner, more choices of vendors, and more services that can address your specific needs. 

To replicate your data in a way that is affordable, it is often compressed.  Right away, you can see that there is a need to make sure that your backup data travels without loss, and that it is compressed in a way that is easily recoverable.  And one of your first choices is to determine if you need to encrypt your data for its trip across a network and at its new destination. If you are dealing with highly competitive or confidential information and intellectual property, encryption is probably a good idea.

Other factors that you will want to consider include:

Scaleability: will you be using a service and technology that will grow with your business and adapt to your changing needs?

Vendor dependency:  what will happen if you change some of your operating software?  Will you still be able to access old data?

Records management:  have you established policies that let you store your data in a way that when old stuff gets so old as to be unnecessary, are you able to delete that, yet keep the old records that are still an important part of your company’s history?

Timing: how frequently are you backing up? Sure we think that everyday is important, maybe even every hour,  but maybe you only need to backup anew when things change – the less you need to upload data and access a storage server the more efficient your operation will likely be.

Your business depends on its data, and your data depends on you taking care of it.  Back up options need not be terribly expensive, nor do they need to be difficult to use.  For example, one service, Data Deposit Box (www.datadepositbox.com) offers pricing at only $2/month per gigbyte of storage. But shop around and get yourself educated – the technologies and service providers are growing all the time.  One good resource is the website for DataLink that has a library of materials on storage (www.datalink.com); and you can also find on-line seminars and lots of industry information on the website of Ziff Davis (www.eseminarslive.com). 

 Prevention and education is the way to keep your sky from falling!

Trainor is the President of Frontier Trail, Inc. a telecommunications consultancy based in Monrovia, CA.  She can be reached at Trainor@FrontierTrail.com.