No matter how much the experts warn about not backing up your data and work, most small business owners skip this process entirely. Over 58 percent of small businesses are not ready for any type of data loss. They have no idea how to back up, and if they do back up, they don’t even know how to use it to avoid losing information.
There are numerous reasons you should set up automatic backups for everything you do, whether it’s your website, social media, or other data and work – you need to back it up often to not suffer a lot of downtimes when disaster strikes. (And yes, I said when.)
Humans Will Always Be Error-Prone
Every time you open a new document and start adding to it, you’re at risk of losing it. While things happen outside of your control, most of the things that happen are due to human error, yours, or someone else’s. Understanding that it will eventually happen if a mistake can happen is essential to your back up mindset.
Hackers Will Hack
The other reason to back up is that sometimes information is hacked. It happens even more than people realize. You may wonder why your little website is even worthy of being hacked, but you have to remember that most of the hacking is first started by bots or little apps taught to find ways to get into a system. If yours is vulnerable, it will eventually happen.
Moving May Be Required
The best thing you have going for you as a small online business is the ability to take your business and move it at will to any hosting site you desire. Of course, you can only move it if you really know where all the files are, and the information is especially if your old host or software stops working for whatever reason. If you have a full backup, you can easily move with a few clicks.
When it comes to saving all your work, the safest way is to use a redundant cloud storage system. It will also help if you have created a good naming convention for your files. It’s not enough to just use Dropbox. You really do need to use a full-fledged backup and recovery system. If you don’t know what you’re doing, hire an expert, this is one time when it pays to outsource. Check out Barracuda.com, Carbonite.com, and iDrive.com for a few options.
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