Test, Test, Test

Your most valuable asset as a business (excluding your staff and bank balance if its positive) is your data. Customer records, tax invoices, contracts, plans, tax information. If it all goes, you will probably go with it (along with the bank balance).

Creating a backup plan and associated procedures are imperative to ensure that should disaster strike, you and your staff know what to do next to get the business started again. Unfortunately for most businesses, the creation of a Backup Plan or process is usually something that happens after data has been lost.

Once you have created your Backup or Disaster Recovery Plan, it needs to be communicated to all staff and it also needs to be accessible both locally and offsite. It must also be kept current which means reviewing it a few times a year to ensure it is still relevant and accurate.

To assist you with your backup you should first consult and IT professional. They will atleast give you a few options to think (get scared) about.

Your Backup Plan is only really effective if the recovery process actually works. Drive backup software such as Carbonite are ideal for micro and small businesses as they give you both a backup process to access and store the data, plus an easy to use method to recover it instantly.

Your backups need to be regular and you also need to consider both online and offline backups. Online allows you to safely store all or some of your data in a remote location, so should the building burn or hardware gets stolen, you can easily retrieve it. Offline backups (local hardware storage) give you the ability to get all of your data back instantly. You need both.

Your backups must also be regular. Services such as Carbonite (online backup) allow your backup to occur automatically for you, so you don’t need to physically perform it. Once a file has been backed up, it is automatically monitored by the software and any changes are updated for you. However your offline backup (using external hard drives) needs to be scheduled and performed daily or at a minimum, weekly.

Small businesses often fall into the trap of not training their entire team on the backup and recovery process. Your staff should atleast know where your backup plan is kept.

And finally Testing. We encourage everyone who trials Carbonite to test the recovery process so they atleast have some awareness of the recovery process when a PC failure occurs. I would expect that 10% probably perform this test. Most people are only interested in seeing the data being backed up. Rest assured Carbonite works. This same rule also applies with your local offline backup. You should be performing a review atleast monthly to ensure that the backup process is actually working and that the files kept on the external drive are correct and accessible.

So in your list of 2010 objectives, at the top of the list should be “Create backup and recovery plan“.