I know for many of you backing up data is boring…and you’d rather just take your chances that it won’t happen to you. Heck. I know some of you have lost your data once and you still don’t want to back up. If you lose your address book, all your contacts and your account records, your business may lose significant time and money.
I wanted to cite a % of businesses the go under after data loss, but I could not find a % and I found an article that said it was a business myth but like “urban myths.” (Topic for another blog.)
I’m bringing this up because in recent weeks I’ve talked to several people whose hard drive has failed…my father, two clients, and one of by co-workers here. In each case, it was a huge time sink and upsetting. They each lost differing amounts of data. Losing our data could happen to any of us at any time, it is not some rare occurrence.
However, there are two easy solutions I know of that update your data automatically so you don’t even have to think about it. No buying disks, remembering to do it or labeling and storing disks.
You are ready for me to tell you already?
One is that you buy an small external hard drive that sits on your desk or on the floor by your desk. I’ve had mine for a year now and it’s about 5-12 inches and less than 2 inches wide. It sits on the on inch side and takes up only a tiny amount of space. Tod (my business partner) bought it for me for about $100 dollars. My Mac has software called Time Machine that automatically backs up my computer every hour.
The other option that might interest you is a cloud service called Mozy.com. For as little as $5 a month you can contract with Mozy.com to back up your data remotely. Everything is saved away from your office, so its safe in case of a fire or earthquake or other disaster. Again, you tell it what to back up and how often and they have accounts for businesses small and large.
Setting up Mozy.com or an external hard drive can be a DIY project but if you need assistance, call your IT person.
Got other great systems for back up automatically and economically? Feel free to mention them here.
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