Why are Backups So Important?

computer-keyboardWhat is one of the most important things in our 21st century lives? Is it the Internet? Constant access to information or social media? While all those are important, something even more critical is our digital data. What do I mean by digital data? How about all those photos you took with your iPhone or digital camera this weekend of the kids? What about all those spreadsheets, word documents and QuickBooks files that make up your business. Could you suddenly, without warning, live without them?

We so often take for granted how easy it is to create all this digital information, but so many times we fail to think about protecting it. All it takes is one click on the delete key and that data we had on the company server is gone. Commonly misunderstood to protect from permanent removal, the household safeguard -- the recycle bin -- is not used on network drives. Said another way; when you delete a folder or file on a network drive, it is permanently deleted with no “holding bin” for undoing the deletion.

Even just a few files deleted can create a problem; A while back, there was a company I knew of who thought their data was being backed up, nightly, safe and secure on schedule. However, when an accident occurred and ended up rendering a folder off the server deleted, they went to restore and discovered that the backups had not been running correctly all this time. Employees had to go back and try to piece together what they could from memory. In the end, it was impossible to recreate everything. This story is not unique to that particular business; So many companies share the same lack of protection, while under the assumption they are covered. What if that server dies or a fire destroys the building? Could your company survive a total data loss? If the server is down and precious company data is gone, how much time and productivity are being lost?

impactlogoLet’s look at an example; let’s say that you have 10 employees who use computers all day, creating and managing digital data (documents, databases, and media). Assume the average payroll for each employee is $35,000/year. If the server goes down and they cannot access the company data to do their job, the company is losing about $1458 dollars per day in just employee base pay. If the server is down for two days, now it’s up to $2916. That backup plan may not seem so expensive now.

I encourage you to take a few moments in your busy day to contact your Information Technology Provider. Establish (or re-verify) a solid data backup plan for your home and company data. Make sure that your information is being backed up and more importantly, that it can be restored fast. It is good practice to test and make sure that you can restore that data at least once per month. If you don’t have an IT provider or you want a second opinion, contact Impact Solutions at 1-877-262-9140. We can make sure that you don’t lose any 1’s or 0’s (or Zzzz’s at night), knowing your data is protected and quickly recoverable-- from slippery fingers on DEL keys to Mother Nature’s wrath.