Have you ever had your computer die, website have a fatal error or something stolen? I have and can I tell you it is the worst feeling in the world. All your hard work, sweat and tears over weeks, months or years have all gone. If it’s happened to you, I’m sure you can relate. Whether it has or hasn’t, have you done everything you can to create your business online backup so that you’re not vulnerable again?
Here are 3 ways to backup your information online that is a must for all businesses these days. Be sure to consider the frequency, availability, usability of tools and costs when selecting the right option for your business, of course this is all relative should you not have anything in place.
Computer Backup
If you’re like me, you have a lot of your information products and services saved on your computer. If you were to loss this information on your main device today, would you have a way to recover it? I heard another horror story the other way with someone losing an entire folder of content and having to recreate it all again L I would certainly not be a happy camper. Most of the big computer brands have their own back up services, please do check these out and utilize them. Make sure they do actually cover everything that you need in all folders (e.g. including pictures as well).
Website Backup
Unfortunately I had to rebuild one of my websites 3 times. You may think that this is easy and it wasn’t too bad, as it was a new site, so the content was easily available. Consider however if you had a website for years, you installed a simple plug-in on the site and it completely crashed. That’s happened to me too! The even worst thing about this is that I jumped down a whole page rank for the website because of this error (which impacted the respectability of my 5 year old site). Be sure to complete regular backups of your websites, so that if anything does happen, you don’t need to re-build from scratch. Instead you can go back to a point in time to re-install for most backup services. Check with your website hosting company to see what they have available. Trust me, having learned this one the hard way (yes multiple times over a matter of weeks), don’t waste any time, do this now!
Team Backup
Often times in small business, there may be only one person with the knowledge to perform a particular task. This opens up the business to a lot of risk should that person wish to go on holidays, be ill, unavailable or leave the business. To reduce the risk make sure you have adequate knowledge transfer strategies in place. This could take the form of instructions with detailed step by step notes of how do complete certain tasks either by written, audio or video form. In addition, running training sessions to share knowledge within your team and ultimately having more than one person have access to particular tools/software etc to complete a task is highly recommended.
This article is of course just the start of your business online backup. Don’t forget to consider anti-virus software and practice good password management as other ways to protect your business online.
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