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Your customer data is a precious resource that can literally be
worth its weight in gold! If used properly, it can be repeatedly
mined for additional sales and referrals. Do you use this gold
mine to increase the profitability of your business?
You should! It can mean the difference between business survival
and failure.
Why then do so few business owners take the time to ensure that
it is adequately protected? Are we too busy? Perhaps you just
did not know how to protect it, or could not afford the software
and hardware required to back up your data correctly.
Ask yourself these questions:
Is there anything more important to my business than my customer
data? What would happen to my business if I were to loose all of
my data?
Consider this common scenario. A client calls frantic that she
would loose her business if she could not recover her customer
data. She had over five years of information on her computer
when the hard drive decided to make her life interesting.
So what are her choices? Renter the data manually, if she has
any hard copies available. Call everyone and ask for his or her
contact information again, will not that make him or her feel
secure about your company. Alternatively, you could call a data
recovery technician. Their services can start at a thousand
dollars and go up rapidly from there!
Windows XP provides a fully functional backup utility, free! In
fact, many of the commercial backup products use this backup to
save the data. All you are paying for is the user interface, the
window into which you enter information.
Before you run the setup wizard, you need to answer a few
questions.
What data do I need to backup?
Only backup data that is necessary. Use the KISS (Keep It Simple
Silly) method. Your customer database and correspondence should
be backed up as a minimum.
How often do I want to back up my data?
How often does your customer data change? Does a significant
amount of data change on a daily basis? Weekly?
Where do I want to store my data backup?
Most data backups still use a tape drive to store the data. The
problem is that they cost a fortune! The tapes alone are
expensive. Alternatives are to store your data backup on another
computer on your network or copy it to a CD or DVD writable disk.
Ok, so you want to backup your data. What now? Before we do that
review the table below:
Full Backup Copies and stores a complete duplicate of your data
every time it runs. Takes the most time to run and the most
storage space. Quickest data recovery feature. Easiest!
Incremental Backup Copies and stores only data changed since the
last backup. Must be combined with a full backup, and any other
incremental backups. Most complicated.
Deferential Backup Copies and stores data changed since the last
full backup. Must be combined with a full backup and the last
deferential backup. Middle of the road.
If you have a relatively small amount of data, I would suggest a
daily full backup. If you have a larger amount of data, you
might combine the full backup with a deferential backup. Simple
huh?
The next question is how to store the data backup. Even though
it takes a little extra work, I have my clients back their data
up to a DVD writable disk. First, set the wizard to back the
data up to a folder. Usually this folder is on another computer.
Then burn this data to a DVD burner and place the disk it in a
secure location for retrieval as necessary.
If you do not feel comfortable setting this up yourself, any
competent PC technician can do it for you. If you want to do it
yourself, click on the following link and it will take you to a
tutorial located on my website.
WINDOWS BACKUP WIZARD TUTORIAL
Whether you do the setup yourself or have it setup by a
professional technician you are taking the first step in
ensuring the long-term survival of your business. Please take
the time to do this.
Ultimately your customers do not care how or why you lost their
information, they just care that you did. I will leave you with
this statistic:
Estimates suggest that 80% of small businesses that suffer a
serious computer failure cease trading within two years. Will
yours be one of them?
About the author:
Rick Parrott, MCP - SA Secure, a San Antonio Texas company
specializing in desktop support and help desk services for small
to medium businesses. Our goal is to provide an alternative to
maintaining an expensive in-house IT staff or relying on many
different individual computer repair technicians. Visit our
website: http://www.sasecure.net
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