Online Data Backup is a Great Option for Disaster Recovery

As a small business owner, have you considered what you will do if your computers or servers crash? What if your building is the victim of fire, flood, earthquake, or vandalism?

Oh, I hope you are not caught unprotected from a power surge or a brown-out in the middle of the night. And none of your employee you recently fired has decided to seek revenge by hacking into your system and deleting all of your sensitive financial and customer information. Your business, large or small, should have a well designed disaster recovery plan for your electronic data.

One vital thing that every single company today, whether it is a small home-based business or a multi-million dollar corporation, must have is a disaster recovery plan.

A disaster recovery plan is how you protect your company in advance of potential catastrophe. The plan does not have to be terribly formal in most cases, but it needs to be something you take care of immediately if you do not yet have one.

The first thing you need to know in formulating your defenses from disaster is that all electronic information, such as documents, spreadsheets, graphics, e-mail messages, etc., need to be copied so that it will still be available to you in the case of an emergency.

While a simple backup on a CD can be practical if you have very little material for a home-based business, the reality is that most businesses, even small businesses, have much more than will fit onto a CD.

And, staff just simply does not back things up on a regular basis if you leave the task for them to do on their own. Most of us think "nothing will happen to my new computer" until something actually does, and we lose everything on it.

If your small business has multiple computers, then you should be using a file server to hold all of your documents. This file server needs to be backed up on a nightly basis at the minimum. While it can be backed up onto tape based media, the tape drive and the media can be very expensive items to purchase.

Another less expensive option is to upload your data to an online data backup service.

An online data backup service is a company which has a large center full of servers. They allow you to connect to them, via the Internet, and upload all of your server's data onto one of their servers.

Your server connects to their server through a secure connection, just as you would if you view your banking information on line. All of the transmission is encrypted so that it cannot be read or stolen by anyone else online.

If you do not use a file server, you can also upload from individual computers.

Once the online data backup service has received your data, you then have a copy many miles away in case of disaster at your location. Your offsite backup can easily be retrieved from them if you ever need it.

As an additional layer of protection, all of the data centers also back up their servers nightly. This ensures that even if their facility has some sort of disaster, you would still be able to get a copy of your data if you were to ever need it.

An online data backup service can be a great way for a small business to archive their data for recovery in the case of a disaster. The services of today are very affordable and secure. Making them a part of your disaster recovery plan is a smart idea.

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