Here is the scenario. You manage a small office of 100 employees. And business is booming. You are writing sales contracts like they are shopping lists. It's just going really well. And then life happens. Suddenly everyone loses connection to the server. "Don't Panic," you keep telling yourself. You calmly walk back to your makeshift server room. You notice that there are red lights on the front of the server. That doesn't reassure you. You power down the server and restart. You still can't connect to the server. Now you're getting really anxious. You are losing $500,000 for every hour that this machine is down. Now you are kicking yourself for not backing up.

A good backup strategy is just part of an overall disaster recovery plan that most businesses should have. This allows for a good continuance of business. If you don't have one, you will be in a similar position as the fictitious person above. You don't ever want to be in this position. It is stressful. If you aren't willing to do a complete disaster recovery plan, at least consider a back up strategy.

Think about how much business critical information is stored on your computers or server. It's probably a lot. Do you really want to go through all the stress that losing that data would cause? Trust me, you don't. Think through all the client contact information that could be lost. Will you lose important financial and tax information as well? Would you lose sales contracts as well? If you are a paperless office, you have to do backups. Don't lose all traces of your documentation. But that's only the tip of the iceberg.

How would losing that data affect your ongoing business? You will spend considerable money if you have to employ a data recovery service. These can run in the neighborhood of $150-$250 per hour. And you will also be losing employee time and possible sales. Would you rather be spending your time talking to data recovery technicians or selling? I know which one I would choose.

Paul McGillivary has been a technologist for 15 years. In that time, Paul has experienced thousands of technology problems, challenges, and products. He brings this experience to bear in the articles that he presents.

Paul runs a data drive hard recovery blog on data recovery and back up strategies. He discusses the latest technologies that help you keep and retain your data.

Source: www.isnare.com