Providing Affordable IT Management to SME's Practice what you preach
So here's an extract from a recent client review...... So i am sat in my lounge surrounded by technology:
1) The house is set up with a wireless broadband network
2) My wife has just bought a brand new HP laptop in preparation to start her degree
3) My daughter is chatting to her friends on her laptop
4) My son is watching a DVD on his PC in his bedroom
What is the common link here? They are all running Windows XP and can back up their data to a CD/RW or a USB based "jump drive". Me? Im running my business on an old laptop running Windows 98, no way to write to CD and it does not recognise the single USB port? what do you think ?
This is a situation that exists in a number of small businesses. The two key areas of risk are data and memorable data. Let me explain...
Data: their is some data you just can not live without. It would always be my advice to take regular back ups of data and if you are going to invest in anything (eg I want to upgrade my PC), I would always recommend spending money on backup devices than an extra 512mb of RAM. A large number of people live in hope of never having a hard disk failure and with the modern production methods of hard drives this is usually the case. But are you prepared to take the gamble? What would you do if you booted up your PC one day only to find a system error? What if you tried to open that word document and found it had become corrupted? A well planned backup strategy does not have to be intrusive. With the low cost of external hard drives, a suffiecient back up drive can be purchased to back up critical data for less that £100.
But what about my friend ? As a minimum he has got to identify he critical data and get copies of it into one folder. Then at least if he has a failure, the data will be in two places on the drive, giving a good data recovery company two chances of recovering it. Secondly, depending how much data their is and how sensitive it is, sign up to a few webmail services and email the data out. At least on their servers it is fairly secure and backed up!
Both of these suggestions are short term fixes and should not be considered as long term and sustainable.
The client needs to review his needs and plan his desktop usage around the key area of recoverability and security of data (Availability Management). This may result in a small investment in a new laptop and a back up solution. With most PC's and laptops now, a DVD writer is standard. Dumping the data to a CD once a month, should be an absolute minimum. For those companies who modify or create data on a more regular basis, a weekly "save" may be more appropriate.
Where is this blog going? Well the title is practice what you preach and on a regular basis, I back up my key data. BUT I dont back up my Outlook email? My contacts and more importantly the URL's for my key website (saved in favourites) and my user ID's and Passwords are all saved electronically.
So my next task is to quickly take a note of these onto PAPER and file them with my business documents until I find the best way to add them into my backup routine. Ask yourself the same question..... Am I happy with my data back up? If I lost my PC tomorrow could I easily remember all of the websites, passwords and ID's I use on a regular basis?
25th Aug 2009