No more excuses

As virtually everything is computerised these days, backups are a very important part of your business. But if you don’t take your backup off-site with you, you’re leaving the door wide open for a potentially business-ending disaster.

Let’s take a look at some of the common excuses for not taking backups off-site with you…

My backup is kept in the company safe

I’ll give you a point for locking up your backups, but what if there were a flood or a fire? Most safes aren’t waterproof, so while a CDROM may just survive a flood, a USB stick won’t …neither would an external hard drive. While some safes are fireproof, they’ll still get very hot inside – enough to melt a CD or to stop sensitive electronic components from working in a hard drive.

My backup takes too long

The larger the file, the longer it takes. Sometimes, due to hard drive read & write speeds, it may actually be faster to save your backup to the local computer hard drive first, then copy it to your external drive or USB stick. But a few extra minutes each day will be worth it when you look how long it’d take you to manually re-enter years worth of data.

It’s too hard, too confusing

Harder than re-entering years worth of data manually?

I keep forgetting to take my backup home

OK, let’s think of something that you’re guaranteed to take home with you EVERY DAY. Your phone is one such item. Some of us wear wristwatches, too. Oh, and your keys – because you’ll need them to start your car or to open the door at home. So why not back-up to your phone, or a USB keyring! What about a USB wristwatch? You could also try cloud solutions like Google’s “Drive” or Dropbox; to name but a few (both have free accounts available).

Whatever the reason not to do a backup, there’s a better reason to backup.