The High Cost of NOT Backing Up Data

Posted by Jim Van on February 9, 2011 under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

The headline read “64% of Small Businesses Do Not Have a Data Backup Plan”, and it was based on the results of a Forrester Research survey of nearly 1,200 small businesses between September and November of 2010, so we’re talking RECENTLY here. I have an anecdote that should serve as a predictor for those who don’t have ANY sort of backup plan, not even a thumb drive swap.

Two years ago, I wrote in this space about a call I received on a Saturday morning from a small business owner who wasn’t a client. He’d been referred to us by one of our clients who was also one of his customers. His problem: hard drive failure, a common enough occurance. We usually tell clients that hard drives have a 3 year lifespan, 2 years for laptop hard drives. The larger capacity the drive, the more read heads it has, all the more points of failure it can have. That’s why we urge people to develop and maintain a solid backup plan, even if they’re only using thumb drives (not recommended).

The drive in question contained everything on which the client depended to run his business: Quickbooks (and its backups, all on the same drive!), Customer lists, transactions, vendor lists, a couple of years worth of emails, contracts, and numerous other documents critical to his business. Without his client and vendor information, his business was dead in the water.

This has happened perhaps a dozen times over Logicomm’s 16-year history. A dozen times too many, in my humble opinion. At the very least, small business people should download a free backup program (look on http://www.download.com), purchase a half-dozen 2 or 4gb thumb drives, and use them to back up data at least twice a day. They should be taken off site, which is generally the tricky part..remembering to do so.

If everyone simply did the minimum, data loss would be an exception, rather than the norm in hard drive failure situations.

I’m not saying that this would happen to every business that didn’t back up data, but in this particular case, we couldn’t restore the data. I’m not sure if it’s related, but the business no longer exists. Commerce department figures from a 2007 study show that 72% of all business fail within 3 years of a data breach or loss. Protect YOUR business and follow some sensible basic backup rules.s