Business continuity refers to a business’s ability to remain up and running, uninterrupted or nearly so, after a disaster. Disaster recovery basically refers to the plan you make that outlines what steps and measures you need to take to ensure your business continuity. A good disaster recovery plan will be able to handle both natural disasters and those caused by people (man made disasters). Earthquake, fire, hurricanes, and flood are examples of natural disasters, and computer viruses, hackers, accidents, user errors, burglary and other similar events are examples of man made disasters.

Without proper backups and security measures in place, if any of those above mentioned disasters happen to you or your business, then you may lose all your data and important systems, not to mention potentially losing the business itself! Fortunately, there are things you can do to create a good disaster recovery plan that will ensure your business stays up and running no matter what. The most important part of it is to have backups of your data created. Make copies of all your data manually or by using software designed to do the job, and then save it to an external hard drive or burn it to a stack of clearly labeled and organized DVDs or CDs. Then go another step further and invest in some of the best offsite backup services – that way, even if your office burns down, your data is still safe and sound somewhere else.

You can also invest in some high quality surge protectors that will help minimize the damage a power surge can do to delicate computer equipment, and make sure that you have fire extinguishers and fire alarms handy in case a fire breaks out. Also make sure that your computer equipment has good, functioning cooling mechanisms like fans, as overheating is a major cause of computer crashes and resultant data loss, and get a good anti virus program that you maintain regularly to keep it up to date and constantly protecting your computers and servers.

If you lose your data for good, then your business could be in jeopardy. Since many of us now use computers for most aspects of running a business, it is incredibly important to have precautions put in place to keep that data safe. Put together the disaster recovery plan that makes sense for you and your business’s needs, and then you can rest a lot easier knowing that even if something where to happen, your business would be able to carry on.

By: Steven Franks

Offsite Backup Tips and Tricks

You know how business owners think that they can save money and use their “unlimited” domain hosting space for their offsite business backup and ended up being suspended by the web hosting company and lost their data? Web hosting companies such as inMotion hosting and Fatcow offer unlimited storage and bandwidth with their hosting plans but they have TOS that prevents you to use their hosting storage for other than your website files.

Don’t get me wrong. They are great web hosting companies. You can check out the inmotion hosting review or Fatcow review and get your website hosted with them. The hosting plans are just not meant to be used as file hosting.

If your computer is used for your business, then you can’t afford to lose any of the information on it and you need to have a disaster recovery plan in place and ready to go just in case. Your plan should cover everything from the most mundane of computer crashes and equipment malfunctions to the most unlikely, like an earthquake that causes your building to fall in. The plan needs to account for both natural disasters and man made or human induced disasters. Natural disasters include the aforementioned earthquake, but also things like fire and flooding. Human induced disasters run the gamut from simple user error that causes file deletion to burglary, hackers, and sabotage.

So how do you start a disaster recovery plan? The most important facet is backing up your data. Make sure you have copies of everything saved somewhere that’s not your PC’s hard drive, so that you can restore that data if you have to. Saving information to things like external hard drives and discs is a good first step, and will keep you covered in case of a computer crash or someone running off with your laptop, but to truly be covered from all angles, you should invest in remote PC backup services. These services will keep copies of your data stored somewhere else, so if your office building should be flooded during a hurricane and your external hard drives ruined along with your PCs, then you still have a copy of all of your data out there so that you can get access to it when you need it.

Obviously, backup services and solutions are not one size fits all. You will need to take a look at what your needs are and find the right solution for you. If you have small amounts of data on a personal computer, then it doesn’t make sense to spend the money on a remote backup disaster recovery solution, unless you are really attached to your mp3s! But if you have a small business that you run, then making the investment in those services absolutely does make good sense. Making sure that backing up your data is an important part of your business’s day to day routine will mean that your business stays safe in the event of a disaster.

By: Steven Franks

Disaster recovery now is for everyone. Yes, even for your MP3s. Some like Mozy provides free backup for 2GB of your important data. Get your disaster recovery with one of the best online backup solutions.