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Protecting Your Business How much of your business is sitting inside your computer? A little while ago I carried the computer that Toni uses out to the car so that she could take it down to our computer guy to have some extra bits and pieces installed. While I was carrying it I suddenly realised that I basically carrying at least half of our business in my arms. Toni uses that machine to produce the work that brings in a lot of our income and if anything happened to it we could be in serious trouble. But of course it's not the circuit boards and processors in the box that are important, it's the files and the work that is saved inside that box that are important. Because nearly all our work is generated for online customers and there is very little produced by way of hard copy those files are vital and without them we're sunk. But our situation is not unique, there are a huge number of small business people out there who are in the same situation as us. And even if your business is not on line the chances are that you store a huge amount of important information on your computer. If you do then I have news for you, you could well be gambling with your future. You see, computers and some of their components - especially hard drives - are fragile things. They crash, they break and all your files can disappear in the blink of an eye. One moment your files are there safe and sound and the next they're gone never to be seen again. So what are you doing to protect your business? Are you backing-up your files regularly? And here I'm not just talking about the files you have on your computer, I'm also talking about the files that you have on your website. Does your website collect and store data on your server? Are you backing that up too? All it takes is for one slight mishap, a lightning strike, a power surge or even a hacker and all your work disappears. Recovering from that can be almost impossible and I've seen some small business operators throw their hands in the air when something like that happens and walk away from their business. They know that the cost of recovery is not worth the effort. And yet all thos hassles could be avoided. Before Toni took the machine down to the computer guy today she copied all her files onto two other computers and each week we have a regular routine of backing up all our files to CD-ROM or DVD. Sure, it takes time but we choose to do it on the weekends when we like to take things a little more easy. And it's an insurance policy to cover ourselves if something does go wrong with one of our computers. We don't collect and store vital information on our websites but if we did we would be backing those up every night too. If you do collect that sort of information then talk to your hosts about running a cron job every night and having the data downloaded direct to your hard drives. These are all simple things that can be done to protect your business but few people bother with it until it is way too late. So play safe and start backing up your files regularly because one day you may find that you need them.
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