Back Up - The Company You Save May Be Your Own

Are you regularly backing up your company data?

If you are, are you also backing up your data to an offsite secure location?

I have a CPA friend named Virgil. One day, one of his clients called him and said:

"Virgil, we had a break-in last night and the thieves stole our computer."

Virgil said, "Well you have backups for your data, right?"

Then his client said: "Yes, but unfortunately, they stole that too."

It is critical that you back up your data and it is even more critical that you store at least one copy offsite. You can always reinstall your programs, but your company data is the life blood of your business.

If you only store your company backups in your office, you are at risk for loss by flood, fire, earthquake and theft. Trying to then recreate your data can be a real challenge to say the least.

So how do you back up offsite? I would recommend the following links:

http://www.carbonite.com/

http://mozy.com/

http://books.smartvault.com/

If you use QuickBooks, you can subscribe to an Online Backup within the software.

Finally, I am very conservative when it comes to data. I would have more than one backup.
For example, I would backup to an online site, backup to an external hard drive and also to a
jump drive that I would password protect. I would keep that jump drive on my key chain.

The chance of those redundant backups all failing at the same time is fairly remote. You also want to periodically test those backups just to make sure that the data is being backed up.

The hassle of backing up is nothing compared to the hassle of having to manually re-enter in your data.