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Back That Thang Up!
Sep 30, 2016
We recently had problems with one of our cellphones "acting weird" and had chalked it up to being an old model and not having enough memory. It would send/receive texts and freeze up whenever it felt like it. Little did we know that the phone would totally freeze up a few days later and would not be able to be resuscitated by the Apple gurus at the local Apple store.
If you've ever had it happen to you, just the title alone gave you that knot in your stomach when you remembered your own misfortune. Or maybe you started to jiggle...hey, we don't judge.
Anyway, you guessed it...we had not backed up for at least 5 months and the laptop that had that backup had crashed about 2-3 months ago. Talk about having a bad day!
For those of you who haven't experienced it; imagine the heartache of losing all your texts, videos, songs, pictures, emails, notes, contacts, etc. that were only stored on that device.
If you're a business owner, imagine this happening to your smartphone--that miraculous device that serves as personal assistant, scheduler, entertainer, teacher, secret shopper, and, with the advent of Siri and Alexa, even sassy companion!
Now, imagine it happening to your work computers and servers. It's sad, but there are so many businesses out there that use desktops or laptops and have no backups of anything. If they're lucky, they're backing a few things up to "the cloud" via some online software or having scheduled backups to a portable hard drive. That's good enough, right?
There are options for businesses that are no longer cost prohibitive. Sure, back in the olden days there used to be dedicated backup "tape drives" and you swapped out the tapes every night, backups took hours to do, and you had to have as many tapes as you wanted days of backup--so five tapes would give you one work week's worth of backup; seven tapes for a full week, or hundreds of tapes if you needed hundreds of days! The setup could easily cost thousands of dollars.
We now have USB sticks that hold hundreds of gigabytes worth of data and portable drives that hold terabytes---much more than what your average family business needs (and most definitely personal ones)--all for a couple of hundred dollars. We recommend that at the minimum you invest into one of these items and backup your data to it.
Oh yeah...use the portable feature---take it away from the premises every day. It doesn't matter if the hardware never fails. What if it ever gets stolen? Or God forbid, there's a fire or flood or other disaster? One of the things about backups is that you can never have enough of them. Though we often laugh when we say it, it really does make absolute sense to "make a backup of the backup!"
If you don't know how to backup your computer, at least back up your major files--those files that you'd actually cry if you lost them.
Examples of things to back up are:
*"Drag and drop" folders where you keep your "stuff" (my pictures, my documents, my music, etc).
*Your accounting software - most have a "create backup" feature...make sure you're backing up to the removable device, not your local C: drive.
*Any other software you use that has a "backup" feature.
We aren't a technical site, but this is an important topic. Therefore, we posted an article on 9/30/16 regarding the importance of backups and some suggestions on how to backup your files.
That data security sage Juvenile gave the perfect technical mantra at the beginning of the new millennium when he suggested to "Back That Thang Up", so let's follow his advice!
Category: Bookkeeping
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