6 Steps to Effective, Painless & Low-Cost Backup

Column: The Bleeding Edge

- June 2011 Online Exclusive -

Another Article on Backups!

Backup has not been cool since 2005.

Office automation is cool. ERP is cool. Even mobile accounting apps are cool. Backup is about as cool as your 8-track tape of KC and the Sunshine Band. And yet, as the folks over at Gillware Data Services were kind enough to point out, recreating lost data from scratch will cost you between $2,000 and $8,000 per megabyte. For a typical PC with only normal data on it, that can run to $20,000 or more.

As for your clients, they are significantly more likely to suffer a data loss than be audited by the IRS. Fewer than 140 businesses with sales under $10 million are audited each day by the IRS. During the same time period, some 5,760 hard drives will crash. That’s one every 15 seconds.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, you awakened suddenly in 2011 and realized that your data is the most important asset of your company — even more important than people, inventory or fixed assets. And suppose you decided you wanted to make your backups effective, painless and at the lowest possible cost.

Here’s how to proceed.

1. Automate the process. The real reason why most companies don’t backup their systems is that it can be a time-consuming process. But in this day and age, it need not be. The system can be set to automatically backup data every hour, every day or whatever frequency is needed, all with no human action required.
2. Use an online data backup service. The Internet has made online backups to an offsite location attractive both in terms of cost and reliability. For accounting firms, the top three vendors on my list would include Norton, Carbonite and Gillware. Of the three, Gillware is the least well known but likely the most economical. I’m sure there are others, but this is a place to start.
3. Forget Microsoft’s built-in backup. Sadly, this is not an online solution, and you’ll spend more time trying to figure out its screwy error messages than you would transcribing your data by hand. There are other, better solutions available online.
4. Beware of complicated services. I have three simple rules. If it stores the data in some unknown format or file type, don’t do it. If it requires you to learn new tech phrases like “mounted volume” or “inconvertible kernel mode exception,” don’t do it. If it requires me to spend more than three minutes talking to a company rep in order to set it up, don’t do it. You want a plain, simple program that copies your data files to a remote server, accessible by you (and only you) from anywhere in the world at any time.
5. Include a hard drive recovery service in your plan. You can’t possibly cover all the places your data is stored. Mobile phone. USB keychain device. The hard drive on your laptop at home. So find a data recovery service you can work with, at a price that won’t break you, and keep them in your rolodex. Just in case.
6. Have a backup of the backup. A good online backup service will have more than one location. That is, they will store a copy of your data on their server, plus a backup server of their own. That helps to ensure that if their server and your server both go down, your data is still secure.

At the end of the day, for small businesses, the only real and viable option for backups is to do it online, rather than messing with external hard drives, tape drives and thumb drives. An online service gives two advantages. First, it physically removes a copy of your data to a secure server in another building, if not another state. Second, and equally important, it provides more real-time options for frequent backups.

During tax season, some accounting firms backup every 10 minutes. Others back up every time they save a new client file to the server.