|
|
| www.1001TopWords.com |
|
|
Data Backups ? One Key to Business Survival
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. If you want to do it yourself, click on the following link and it'll take you to a tutorial located on my website. WINDOWS BACKUP WIZARD TUTORIAL 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? Rick Parrott, MCP - SA Secure, http://www.SASecure.net, a San Antonio TX company specializing in desktop support and help desk services for small to medium businesses. Our goal is to provide an alternative to maintaining an expensive in-house IT staff or relying on many different individual computer repair technicians. Working for fortune 500 corporations has taught us the value of continuity when it comes to your IT needs. Calling in random repair technicians does not allow for this continuity, the technician has to learn your business every time you change to another company. This causes inefficiencies in the process, which lead to higher support costs and lower reliability. We offer on-site desktop, remote telephone, network and wireless support. Need a project manager? What about end user computer training? In short everything the big corporate players enjoy we can provide for your business, at a fraction of the costs! email: rickparrott@sasecure.net
|
|
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
Online Data Backups for Newbies How long have you been doing business online? Whether you are new or an old timer you need to understand the one important truth of the e-world. That being that the largest threat to business survival is data loss. Do I Really Need To Backup? Okay, computers a machine, right? Okay, maybe not yours. Youhave this special relationship, but that a subject foranother article. Machines break. Software gets fouled up.People make errors. These things happen, and for thosereasons alone, you need to back up all your critical data,redundantly, in a couple of different locations. Backup -- But Where To? We all know we have to backup regularly, but those backups files can get huge. Add that to your existing your files and your notebook computer hard drive seems to have shrunk overnight. No matter what size hard drive you have on your notebook computer, space is a premium. Besides, it's not exactly a good idea to store your backups on the same hard drive since you can't retrieve it -- rather defeats the purpose of backing up don't you think? So what do you do, what are your options? Comparing Data Recovery Software Software programmers recognize the importance of data files, and thankfully, they have been able to create products that demonstrate their understanding of how often people accidentally delete or lose important data. Thanks to software programmers and development companies, people have a variety of data recovery software programs available to purchase in the event they've lost vital data. Hard Drive Crash? The Essential Data Recovery Report Your worst nightmare just became a horrifying reality. You keep hearing that little voice in your head mockingly shout "you should have backed that stuff up" The voice keeps echoing throughout your head as you perform a quick inventory all of the important information that you just lost?..your client database, a years worth of e-mail, your entire inventory database, even your family photos. The Best Data Recovery Choice For You The best defense against a loss of data is a really solid and faithful backup routine of important files to reliable media. It's also a good idea for the media to be removable and portable if possible so that even if something happens to your whole computer for any reason, the data is protected by being in a totally different physical area. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery - Reducing Your Risk Profile Like all plans, there is an ultimate goal to achieve. The goal in a business continuity plan is simply that: to continue your business in the face of a disaster or a disruption. A business continuity plan is not just for a disaster. It's also for the smaller things in life, like your friendly neighborhood burglar who decides to borrow all of your computers or the small power interruption, which causes loss of data and downtime or the fire five floors below you, which causes a 5 hour building shutdown. These are a few of the many things, which do occur every day and do happen to companies like yours. Data Backup Solution: Why You Need a Backup Plan in Place ? Part 1 Is a data backup solution part of your computer plans? Do you have a way to protect yourself if something goes wrong with your computer or data? Computers are a useful part of our lives but we don't always protect ourselves from their loss be it fire, theft or hardware failure. Disaster Recovery- Managing the Risk Helping your business survive in the event of an unforeseen disaster: Most business failures are not from bad business but from bad business practices. Offsite Data Backup Not Just for Fortune 500 Companies Anymore In today's high paced digital world there is a very high value placed on information. Not just the kind of information you read in the newspaper or your favorite trade journals, but the type of information that we generate on a day to day basis with our digital devices. There was a time when a concept like "offsite data backup" was relegated to the geeks in IT at Fortune 500 companies? Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery - The Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan Essentially, the plan addresses the who, what, where, why and when of recovery. Goal number one is to reduce the risk profile of the business. Goal two is to be well prepared so the impact of any disruption is minimized. Overall, the objective of the plan is to effectively minimize the chances of disruption and, if there is a disruption, to quickly implement the recovery and get the business or organization working again. The "why" is to maximize business continuity and minimize damages to company assets. Ultimately, the goal is to protect the organization from the key risks identified and to effectively implement the recovery strategies. Data Recovery - You Can Get It Back! Data recovery is a process whereby you can save data andfiles you accidentally deleted, had eaten by malicioussoftware or viruses, hardware failures, corporate espionageand many more scenarios. Most people believe that when thehard drive crashes their world ends also, but that's notusually the case. In fact 85% of the time the data isrecoverable, and at far less trouble and expense than youmight fear at first. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery - A Business Not a Technology Issue Hackers, hurricanes, fires, flooding, power outages, denial of service attacks, application failures, employee error, sabotage and now terrorism are helping companies to focus on the necessity of a business continuity plan. Are The Words Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning Rolling Off Your Lips? It might be more fun to talk about those free online business cards that are saving the company money, or those nifty designer business checks that are helping to solidif your branding efforts at the next staff meeting, but what really should be rolling off your lips are the words "business continuity and disaster recovery planning". Nothing is more important to a company than having a comprehensive recoveery plan in place prior to when disaster strikes. The framework for disaster recovery and business continuity planning will be different for every company. But every company needs to have a plan. Want To Beat The Odds? Disaster Recovery Planning is Essential Statistics show two out of five businesses go out of business within five years of experiencing a major disaster. Avoiding Hard Disk Data Recovery Services As a home computer owner, one of the greatest threats to yourinformation and to your wallet, is hard disk failure. When yourdrive crashes, you will quicky realize how valuable theinformation you can no longer access is. 5 Simple Tips to Prevent MS Access Database Corruption It's important to understand that any time an Access client disconnects unexpectedly, it may set a "corruption flag" in the .mdb file indicating that the database is in a corrupt state (regardless of whether any data has actually been corrupted or not). Any user who attempts to open the database while this flag is set will receive a message, and the database will have to be repaired before it can be used. If the users don't have permission to perform the repair, or don't know how to perform the repair, there may be significant downtime before the database is available again. This can result in a loss of productivity as well as extreme frustration for the users. Following the 5 tips below will minimize your odds of data loss from corruption in your Access databases. Big Time Disaster Recovery Solutions Available for the Little Guy There was a time - not too long ago - that Data Disaster Recovery solutions were available only in the domain of multinational corporations and big business in general. However, with the proliferation of high speed internet access and the ability to store large amounts of data in a much more cost effective manner due to plummeting storage costs, the ability to perform a secure backup of data to a remote location engineered specifically for the purpose of securely storing massive amounts of information is now in the reach of the general public. Disaster Recovery Made Easy With Online Backups Whenever disaster strikes the most critical asset that every company should have protected from sudden loss due to fire, flooding, or theft is their data. No matter what happens to your hardware you can be sure to be able to be up and running no matter how sudden or how severe your damage or loss is - if you use an online backup system. When Disaster Strikes: How Long Would Your Business Survive if Files On Your Computer Disappeared? A Tornado? In Birmingham? In The United Kingdom? Unthinkable!
|
| © Athifea Distribution LLC - 2013 |