Back Up Your Business
Backing up mission-critical data is essential to your business survival.

By Jeff Shackelford

How long could your business survive without its critical business information? Think about that for a moment: no customer records, no financial records, no listing of current inventory or accounts payable, no personnel files and no business contacts database—years of business history lost forever.

Most small businesses lack any kind of disaster recovery plan to deal with fire, flood, theft, lightening strikes or even employee sabotage. Repurchasing office furniture and computers easily can be done, but without a proper data backup and recovery program, restarting your business following a disaster could take weeks or even months. Could your business survive that long?

What Data to Protect
There are cost-effective, easily managed options to prevent your business from ever being without the critical data needed to properly run the business. Proper data protection requires keeping copies of your critical files in a separate location. Keeping a copy of it in another folder on the same hard drive is a poor choice, and keeping all of it on a single media device (CD or tape) isn’t the best option either. With a minimal amount of planning and expense, most small businesses can develop a data backup program that provides complete and timely protection.

Before developing the “how to” part of your data backup plan, it’s important to determine what data is critical and must be backed up; how much total storage will be required; how often data will be backed up; and how quickly the recovery process needs to be in case of an emergency.
What data to back up is unique to each business. If you are a small architectural company, you may have large graphics files and project plans from current and previously completed projects that are vital to your business. If you’re a 25-person mortgage-brokering company, your business may depend on daily e-mails to complete transactions, so keeping properly stored backups of your e-mail files is essential. Financial records, customer records and inventory files are typical examples of data that should be consistently backed up. The fact is, as the business owner, only you can define what is mission critical and must be quickly recoverable for you to run your business. Proper evaluation of your data needs can help prevent spending too much money and time on backing up non-essential and duplicate data.

Backup Process
Once you have identified the data, determined the amount of storage needed, and how frequently to back it up, the decision as to which backup medium is right for your business becomes much easier. But data storage requirements are only part of the equation. The most important decision may be the backup method that you choose to ensure the process is initiated on a timely basis and executes properly. Nothing is more frustrating, and possibly devastating, than thinking your mission-critical data is being properly protected through a data backup process, only to find out after a crisis that the process was not being initiated or not properly completing the backup. If your backup process relies on human intervention to run or execute, or relies on someone’s memory to change tapes or clean drives, your business is highly susceptible to missing or corrupt backup files when you need them most.

With today’s storage options, implementing a data backup system that executes transparently and requires no human intervention is easily affordable and implemented. There are many onsite options that reside as part of the network and complete backups several times a day without any user intervention or network disruption. There are a growing number of off-site storage options that also run automatically and require no human interaction. Several of these options include monitoring and notification in the case of a failed backup—an important feature to ensure your backup process is, in fact, backing things up.

Customize Your Solution
There is no single form of data backup that is right for every business. If you run a one-person consulting business, you may decide that a recordable DVD or flash drive can hold all the data you deem critical for your business, and you personally complete the backups on a bi-weekly basis. On the other hand, if you run a 15-person staffing agency and your business depends on client lists, job postings and candidate resumes—all stored electronically and vital to your very existence—you may want to consider an off-site solution that executes several times a day and can provide nearly instantaneous data recovery.

No matter how big or small your business, a proper data backup and protection program should be a part of your business process. And with today’s abundance of choices, finding one that fits your budget and is easily executed on a timely and consistent basis is relatively painless.

Jeff Shackelford is president of Tech Guys, an Overland Park-based provider of computer and network services. Shackelford can be reached at or (913) 381-5832.