NFIB

Slow Down and Back Up
09/ 29/ 2003

by Julie Bawden Davis

When a virus infected Doug Mear’s computer system a couple of years ago, panic set in quickly.

"I lost just about everything because I didn’t have a backup," says the owner of Kawabunga Cooler Company www.kawabungacoolers.com, a Costa Mesa, Calif., company that manufactures personal coolers. "Even though I knew I should be backing up, I honestly didn’t think I’d ever need it. The experience cost me a great deal of time and money."

Losses to small businesses that fail to perform backups are common, says Greg Davis, president of South Coast Computers Inc., www.southcoastcomputers.com in Santa Fe Springs, Calif.

"Equally as common are backups that don’t work," says Davis. "Many business owners are shocked to discover that 25 to 30 percent of backups aren’t saving data. Just because you put a new tape in every night doesn’t mean that the system is backing up."

The good news is that there is a solution to backup challenges. Davis offers this advice:

Do full backups daily. Full backups make a complete copy of every file you want to save. Incremental backups just save what has been modified since the last full backup.

Practice tape rotation. Invest in enough tapes to perform what is known in the computer industry as a 10-day tape cycle, which will allow you to save up to three months of data. With this system, if you lose a file from three weeks ago, it will still be retrievable.

Always have an off-site tape. In the case of fire or other disasters, you’ll still have a backup.

Automate. Rather than doing a manual backup every night, have the system back up automatically. This covers you for vacations and forgetful days.

Test your backup. Have a computer professional check your backup on a regular basis. If you would like to test the system yourself, delete a file you can afford to lose and try to restore it from the backup.

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This article originally appeared in the October/November 2003 issue of MyBusiness magazine.

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