In order for a business to be successful, it must stay in business.  One of the reasons many businesses fail is the loss of their data. You can lose your computer, and data on the computer, through theft if someone breaks into you office and steals your equipment.  You can lose the computer through fire, flood, tornado, or other natural and man-made disasters.  You could get a bad computer virus, or you could be typing away and hear that horrible click, click sound, and then get the “blue screen of death” when your hard drive fails.  Yes, there are many ways to lose your computer data, and it is a question WHEN, not IF.

If you back up your data by some type of external hard drive, tape drive, or mirror drive, and your backup is in the office with you, it will probably not do you much good if your office burns, floods, gets blown to bits, or someone comes in and steals your external hard drive, etc., when they take your other equipment. If you are only backing up one data set, then you might overwrite good data with data that has been infected by a computer virus.

Offsite data backup has become much more reasonably priced, and often will store multiple encrypted data sets going back several weeks, and also may store your data remotely at multiple locations.  Redundancy is helpful in case one of their offsite backup location burns, floods, or gets blown to bits, and it is always nice to go back to the last data set before you downloaded the computer virus.

It is well worth your while to make sure that you automatically backup your data, such as setting it to back up automatically every evening, so that you don’t forget to run your backup.

If your business data is important to you, take the time to make sure that your data is securely backed up offsite.

When is the last time that you backed up?