I can’t emphasize often enough how critical a good backup plan is for your important data.
A recent incident with a customer has given me reason to mention this once again. This particular customer had a hard drive go bad last week on the laptop containing their QuickBooks files. By the time they called me, something had also happened to the flash drive on which their backups were stored and that drive had nothing on it. The only other copy of the QuickBooks file they had dated back 6 months. Intuit had quoted them an obscene amount of money to re-purchase the software and help them retrieve their 6 month old backup.
I was able to download and re-install their QuickBooks software (even though it is the 2012 version) since they had the license key and product number. But retrieving the current copy of their file was deemed hopeless after removing the hard drive from the laptop and attempting to get two other computers to read it.
By that time, their only option was to use a data recovery service which was going to cost probably around $700 plus the cost of an external hard drive (to put the retrieved information on) and shipping. The last information I had was that the customer decided they didn’t have the funds for the data recovery service and had decided to re-enter the data to bring their books current.
Backups are all too easy to let slip through the cracks when taking care of daily business gets in the way. If you do rely on manual backups and have a consistent procedure in place then good for you but at least make sure you have two or three different forms of media to which you backup and rotate them.
I’m finding, however, that the most cost effective and reliable method is to use on-line or cloud backups. These can be set to run every day, keeping your critical information safely backed up and current. More information can be found about The Brush Geek’s cloud backup solution here. We resell services with a company called LiveDrive.
The bottom line is that the monthly cost of a good securely encrypted on-line backup service is a relatively minor investment when compared to the costs of trying to recover your data when disaster happens. Oh, and if you should need disaster recovery we also resell services for this as well but be warned it probably won’t be inexpensive!
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