Backing up your Business

There are many things which you can't control which can kill your small business but there is one thing which will kill or severely damage a business which you can avoid: loss of your computer files.

Oh, sure, you've got one of those little tape gizmos in your computer that backs up the whole drive every night at 2:00 am. Try a test - see if you can find and restore half a dozen important files from the tape to your hard drive. That's not how it works? You restore the whole drive? You mean the drive that's just finished emitting major grinding noises. The one in the computer which is going to spend two weeks in the shop while your business goes down the toilet? No, you're going to restore to a drive in another computer. One which has a different configuration and needs different drivers so that nothing works. Yea!

You use floppies? This is a really bad idea. Not only are they fairly delicate and unreliable, they don't hold enough data. Where are you going to store your 1.5 MB database? Oh, zip format with disk spanning - another source of errors. At least with floppies unlike with tape, you're just backing up data, not programs and at least the medium is universal - you can get that data back on any computer. But it is slow!

Let's step back here and see what's really needed:

• you need your data in an easily accessible format which will work with almost any computer;
• this shouldn't take a lot of time;
• the format should be secure;
• you should be able to get your business up and running again quickly, even after loss of your main computers.

To achieve this, you should do the following:

1. Don't back up your hard disk but make sure you either have all the original program diskettes or CD's or can buy newer, compatible versions of your programs if needed.
2. Don't use "back-up" programs - just copy your data files onto your back-up medium.

Finally, the million dollar question: what to use for a back-up medium. Zip drives are good - one $15.00 disk holds 100 MB and the drives are very widespread. The drive on another computer on your company network is good as is the drive on a networked portable but don't neglect storing data outside the office. Here is another alternative - backing up over the Internet. Besides trying to sign you up, the site has some information about problems with backing up and some horror stories. I haven't tried the service - it's overkill for my business. I use a Zip drive. But if the service were less expensive, I might go for it.

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