The Little Geeni

Your customer data is a precious resource that can literally be worth its weight in gold! If used properly, it can be mined over and over 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 didn’t know how to protect it, or couldn’t 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’d loose her business if she couldn’t 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 their contact information again, won’t that make them feel secure about her company. Or 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, for 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 you enter information into.

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 don’t feel comfortable setting this up yourself, any competent PC technician can do it for you.

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 don’t care how or why you lost their information, they just care that you did. I’ll 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?

Backup Backups, Business, Data, Survival

There’s nothing that will work without the right parts and that goes for data backups as well. For those of you that already know, the online backup software that any remote backups company uses is the engine that drives their success. Without the right software nothing good gets saved.

Remote Data Backups

And that’s what these remote data backups are really all about. They want you to feel safe using their services and the best way they can do that is to reassure you that their brand of online backup software is the one that will get the job done and keep all of your mission critical data safe.

Safe Location

You need to be sure that the company you’ve put your trust in can in fact do the job and save all of you data in a safe location where it wont be corrupted or stolen, and some of the best places in the world that do this kind of business swear by two names that are big brands in the IT field. The top companies like Cisco and HP provide the firewall and server technology.

It’s essential that any of the remote backups companies have a plan to show clients that can impress them. After all, this companies are asking people to trust their most valuable asset, their information, to them. For that reason their website should have detailed explanations on them about what the firm can offer. Look for a section on the online backup software that’s being used and the security features as well.

Affiliate Testimonials

It’s also helpful to have a look at what they have to offer their affiliates and what kinds of accolades they get from them if any. You can tell a lot about a company by the way they treat their resellers and how many of those people are willing to testify on the website.

All in all, you need to consider a few factors when you’re looking for a company to handle your data backups. It’s a simple process that you need to turn over to a trusted set of professionals who can take data protection worries off your hands.

Backup Backups, Data, Nothing, Software, Without

Today more than ever, data backup is crucial. As we become more dependent on our computers, our data gets larger and as a result backing up becomes a necessity. Years ago, backup equipment was expensive, slow and not economical for the average home user. But all that has changed thanks to the Information Super Highway.

 Within the last few years, more and more online backup companies have emerged and with them came a new approach at doing backups…online backups. However, due to disk space and bandwidth restrictions, online backups were only available to companies or wealthy home users. But today just about anyone can get setup with online backups.

Why are backups important? I can’t tell you how many times a client will come to me to help recover his/her data, when I ask if they have done a backup, the answer is almost always No ( or yes but they didn’t do one correctly.) If I’m unable to recover the client’s data, the customer is left heartbroken. The amount of time it takes for the client to replace the lost data doesn’t compare to the amount of money it will cost them to replace it. This is why backup’s are so important, especially when you can get online backup for as little as $5 per year, or even FREE.

Most online backup software are painless to install and easy to configure. Once installed you generally add a folder to “watch” and the backup software will upload the contents of that folder to the company’s server on the internet over a secure connection. Any time files or folders are added, they are backed up (or uploaded if you will) to the company’s server. Should you have a disaster happen and need your data restored, you generally log into a website and restore the data you need. With Operating Systems like Windows Vista, where most of your data is stored in a centralized folder (C:usersusername), setting up a backup is rather easy.  So hopefully you have learned that online backups are Inexpensive, Necessary and easy to do. If you need assistance with installing, setting up or restoring the backup, visit http://fastsupportonline.com

Online Backup Companies and Price (as of this writing):
Carbonite
Price: $49.95 per computer /Year
Amount of Storage: Unlimited
Website: http://carbonite.com
Mozy:
Price: from Free – $6.95 per computer +$0.50 per GB /Month
Amount of Storage: from 2GB – Unlimited
Website: http://mozy.com
IDrive:
Price: from Free – $499 /Year
Amount of Storage: from 2GB – 500GB
Website: http://www.idrive.com/

Backup Backups, Data, Online