I was recently speaking to a small business owner in the area and the subject of Nightly Backups came up. I was explaining to him how I am looking to partner with an Online Backup Provider so that I can offer that as a service to my clients when he asked me a question that I wasn’t expecting: “Why do I even need a Backup?”
I was taken aback. I mean, how can you not need a backup? I started to list the reasons that everyone should have a good backup of their data:
What if there’s a power surge or a lightning strike?
What if your hard drive crashes?
What if someone breaks in and steals your equipment?
What if a file or an email gets deleted by someone not knowing what they’re doing?
What if the building burns down?
What if there’s a flood? (It’s been raining an awful lot here in Louisville the past few days)
For some businesses it’s even illegal not to keep a backup of your files.
All of these are valid reasons for a good backup, but here’s what I realized: As a Small Business (where legality isn’t an issue), those things that I listed are extremely remote, if not completely acceptable risks compared to the cost of actually purchasing and implementing a Backup Solution.
I needed another way to emphasize the importance of a backup. I needed a rubber-meets-the-road example for a business that has only one computer that has important data on it and the total data to be backed up is less than 10 Gig.
I know what I came up with and I’ll gladly share it in a future post, but I’d love to hear what other people would say. Do you have a backup? Why or why not? How often do you back up your data? In your business, why is it so important to have a good backup? Let me know what you think.
Dennis Edmondson Jr
Computing Concepts LLC
*UPDATE* I gave my answer in the post called “Why Backup? – My Answer“
