Overview
Most businesses should back-up their work data a least once a week (and possibly every day) to cover the risk of failing hard drives or loss of computers. You should be committed to making regular backups as it’s much better (and cheaper) than trying recover data from failed computers.
What to backup?
You should consider carefully all the data you update on a regular basis e.g. documents, spreadsheets, accounts packages, email and any other business specific software/data you are using.
To get a better idea of the scope of your data, make a list of all the programs you use over a typical week and consider carefully where the data is held for each of these programs. This is the only way to ensure you manage to backup everything that is significant to your business.
Organising your data
If the organisation of your data is consistent then the whole backup process is much easier, e.g. If all your data is held in sub folders of ‘My Documents’ then saving the entire contents of ‘My Documents’ will provide a simple means of backing up. In practice, data tends to be held in various locations on your computer which will all need to be included when you create your backup procedures. This may be a good time to review how and where your data is stored.
Where to backup to?
The current advice is to use two backup media in tandem to give you a much better chance of recovery should you have a major problem. This approach has proved effective and is much better than typical single backup system.
You must save your data to a reliable media (this does not include your main hard drive). This includes external hard drives, spare internal hard drives and online backup systems. Pick any two media, and backup frequently and comprehensively.
Note: CD/DVD’s and usb pens are ok for casual backups but in practice most users tend to do these infrequently making them unreliable.
Who’s checking your backups are working?
Unfortunately backups may also fail so you need to monitor them carefully. If you have staff give this task to someone who can cope with it otherwise check it yourself.