The Truth Behind Small Business Backup

Computer repair businesses can provide you with great insight into how small businesses backup, or in this case how they don’t.

I received a call the order day from a potential reseller for Carbonite, who told me about the many cases he had come across lately where small businesses think they are backing up their critical files but in reality they aren’t.

What amazed me (and it probably shouldn’t have) is just how much risk some businesses are prepared to take on because they are ignorant of their computer needs.

In this one case, the reseller visited a news agency that kept their backup on disks. So the intention was there. The reseller decided to take a sample of CDs to see what was actually on them. He found that many of the disks where totally empty. So either the business owner didn’t backup properly, or with time, the quality of the CDs deteriorated and the data was lost.

In a 2nd example, the reseller visited another business which had a PC that was being backed up. The business owner in this case had 2 hard drives on the desktop. So even though the data was being backup should one hard disk fail, it wasn’t kept off site nor even in another room. So should the room burn or the PC have some terminal failure (eg power surge), the data wouldn’t be accessible.

Computers are complicated things and backing up even more complicated but a simple call to a PC shop will probably do for most small businesses.

The number of enquiries we receive on a weekly basis regarding online backup and remote backup solutions has escalated significantly. I am unsure if its because more people are looking at this type of solution or if our improved Google rankings mean more people are finding us.

So where to from here, at a time when businesses are starting to look more inwards rather than outwards, online and remote backup must be added to the short list of key projects for 2009.

Something like Carbonite is probably one of the cheapest pieces of software you will ever purchase but its worth thousands should that inevitable happen and your PC crash or you have some other disaster.

We obviously would like to see everyone with an online backup solution like Carbonite, but even if they simply use a hard drive that they take offsite each night.

Do the right thing by your business, please backup.