Are you the small business that never backs up your data?

We all rely heavily on digital technology, to run our lives, our work, our businesses. But what happens if something goes wrong? Apparently 10% of small businesses never back up their data, and more than 50% only back their data up once a month or less. Just because you have the most up-to-date or expensive technology doesn’t mean that something can’t go wrong, nothing is invincible (apart from superheroes!).

Why are we so concerned with making sure small businesses back up their data? Well, there are plenty of reasons, hopefully it’s pretty self-explanatory. Lost data equals lost time and therefore lost money. And not just the time it takes to retrieve or recreate the data, but potentially you could lose it altogether and it won’t be something you can simply recreate.

Ways in which your business could lose data include device theft and/or loss, data theft, accidental device damage, hard drive failures, computer viruses, and even natural disasters – have you made sure that your data back-up plan is fire-proof? There are lots of potential ways to lose the data and a lot of businesses don’t prioritise the solution until it’s too late.

We suggest setting up a regular data back-up, the frequency depends on your business’ data usage, capacity for carrying out the back-up and the technology you’re using to do it. Some businesses choose to do a soft back-up at the end of every day and a bigger all-encompassing one at the end of each week. But whether you have it set to do automatically or you do it manually, just remember to do it regularly!

You also need to ensure that you’re backing up all of the necessary data, apparently 60% of all business data is held on PC or laptop desktops, which often isn’t included in regular server backups. And also ensure that the back-up data is recoverable, apparently 40-50% of SME data backups are not fully recoverable, there’s not much point in backing up your data if it has no use after it’s done.

Remember that you need to back-up your website (and associated data) as well as the general files and folders on your computers. If you choose to host your website with Webforward, that’s a weight off of your mind as our hosting packages all include R1Soft continuous back-ups.