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.

Backing up your data should be an essential part of your daily routine. Unfortunately for many businesses this simply isn’t the case. The only time data backup crosses their mind is when they have a hard disk crash or a serious spyware or virus infection. Unfortunately by this stage it’s already too late to do anything about it – the data is gone and you’re then looking at several hundred, if not several thousand, dollars to have the data rescued and restored.

The concept is simple – choose a data backup plan and stick to it.

The burning question on most IT managers minds is should the data be stored locally or remotely? To be fair this is the pivot point of all data backup plans. There are pros and cons to each method.

Local Data Backup

Most companies rely on either DVD, external hard disk or tape drive data backup solutions locally. These provide fast, cost effective storage for most small companies and are also very easy for even the IT novice to operate. In the case of any data being lost it’s simply a matter of restoring the data from a previous backup point and the user can then continue working.

The data, however, is only as safe as the building it’s in. What happens in the case of fire, burglary, flooding or storm damage? That’s right you just lost all your data backups in the blink of an eye.

Remote Data Backup

As an emerging industry remote data backup has really taken off. Most commonly remote file backup services allow you to log into a remote drive and via a web based interface upload all your critical files. 5GB of storage space is the entry point for most of the remote data backup services and this is provided at a low cost. Knowing that your data is being stored in a secure facility that’s deliberately protected against harm allows you much greater peace of mind.

The weak point here however is the data transfer speed. Unless you’re operating a high speed LAN in your company then remote backup can be a complete waste of time as you’re tied to the maximum upstream speed of your network – which can be surprisingly slow depending on your IT infrastructure. Add in the issue of firewalls blocking uploads on certain ports and it can quickly become a real IT headache.

So how do achieve a Win-Win scenario? Blended backup! Look at utilizing both of these forms of backup. In an ideal world you’d store a local copy of your data and then upload an exact copy of that data to the remote file backup server. If money is an issue then store your bulk data locally but copy your mission critical data to the remote backup service. That way in the worst of disasters you’ll still have the data you need to actually function as a business. That’s not to say that bulk data such as archived email is not important but that old data could be recovered in time by a data recovery specialist whereas you mission critical data needs to be available at a moments notice.

Do you need help deciding which remote file backup solution is right for you. Visit our best online backup services comparison. Most will have free no-credit-card-required trial versions or even free remote backup space for 2GB of storage.