Have you backed up your business information?

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With World Backup Day falling this Friday, we thought we’d look at this simple little administrative task that can save so much grief and headache (and potentially cost!) If you don’t have a system to regularly back up your business data, then make sure you read the below, and give us a call if you’d like any help with this.

Nowadays we all have multiple devices and files and with the team being increasingly connected and dispersed, they can be located all around the world, so it can sometimes be hard work to make sure everything is consistently up to date, saved and a reserve copy created and kept up to date.

The idea is to keep data safe and accessible so that whatever happens to your systems, you can access important data almost immediately, recover in a few hours (if not a few minutes), and suffer practically no downtime.

So how do you back up your business information? Check out our top tips below:

  1. Don’t forget to back up your phones.

We do everything on our mobiles nowadays, for work and pleasure, and they’re the easiest thing to lose. If you haven’t backed up and you lose your phone then it’s going to cause you big problems. However it is an easy process to ensure this doesn’t happen. If you use an iPhone, download iTunes on your computer and connect your phone once every day (you could do it while charging) and data will be backed up. Similarly, Android phones can be backed up to Google Drive and Google Docs. If you lose an Android phone, you can actually still access all of your documents on Google Docs without having to wait to recover backed up data.

  1. Practice redundancy

This means backing up your business data multiple ways. Flash drives are good ways to backup important files (make sure to password-protect sensitive files), particularly if you’re likely to need them on the move. Hard drives are also a great choice, often much bigger and allowing more information to be saved. Just remember that only backing up on-site is not a good idea in case anything happens at that site.

  1. Take it to the cloud

Take a few seconds to set up an automatic online backup for your files and these will automatically back up for you. There are plenty of free online backup and storage solutions including Google Drive, DropBox and OneDrive, these often have free storage space for a limited amount and if your data needs more space, you can buy more for a minimal charge.

  1. Explore business backup solutions

There are dedicated business backup solutions such as Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery that are specifically designed not only to automatically backup data but even to restore your computer systems to a certain point in time with downtime of only a few minutes. This particular solution is designed for companies with 10 or more employees, however there are other solutions out there for smaller businesses too.

Don’t wait to suffer data loss before you do something to protect yourself. Take the time now and backup all of your important data. If you need further help or advice about backing up or other administrative tasks, please do feel free to call us.