A few weeks ago I posted an entry called “Why Backup?“, I ended that article with a promise that I would give you my answer in a future post. With today being World Backup Day, I figured now would be a good time to share my thoughts as to best reason in the world to make sure you have a solid backup of your data.
Some consultants will point to potential cost savings as the number one reason for a solid backup solution, others will point toward a quick recovery from a future disaster, and still others may mention freedom from the heartache of losing years worth of work. Everyone of those will win over a handful of backup hold-outs, but the majority of those that you win will be larger businesses where the owners and managers spend hours every week looking at ROI Projections and Profit/Loss Reports. For a small business, one that provides a service for local consumers, the best possible reason to keep a good backup of your data is because you owe it to your customers to do so.
As small businesses that specifically target local customers, our job is to make those customers feel as secure as possible in their decision to use our services. Don’t break the trust that you’ve worked so hard to build by failing to do something as simple as make a daily backup. I’ll lay out a couple of examples and you can comment later and tell me if you agree.
CPA Firm
Mrs. Mary Grandmother comes into your office on the first Monday in February every year. She brings you all of her financial documents and receipts for the last year in an envelope taped to the top of a tin of homemade chocolate chip cookies. She has no idea that back in November your office flooded and you lost all of your client data. You have to send her home to get her last several years’ worth of tax returns that you can only hope that she holds on to. I can guarantee she holds on to them from now on, you’ll be lucky if she doesn’t start shopping around for a new accountant after all the trouble she’s gone through this year.
Technology Consultant
Joe the Lawyer is spending the next three weeks in Hawaii with his family. Being the Cutting-Edge consultant that you are, you set up Joe so that he could connect to his office computer from his laptop while sitting on the beach. Joe calls in on his first morning in Hawaii with a problem; he can’t connect. He desperately needs a file on his work computer for a federal case that he thought he had more time to put to bed, but it turns out that the judge wants this information, right now. You have a few problems of your own, your server crashed over the weekend. All of your data is gone, you have no idea what Joe the Lawyer’s passwords are, you don’t even know what type of equipment you sold him to enable his remote access. Joe has to come back from vacation to take care of this right away. I think it’s safe to say you won’t be getting a Christmas Card from Joe this year.
Grocery Store
Fred has been shopping at your store for years. It’s convenient, right around the corner from his house. He’s known the “Pop” from Ma and Pop’s Grocery Store since they were kids. Fred was a little put out when your store went away from the old style registers to the new ones, the ones with the barcode scanners, like the big stores use. He was afraid that you were selling out a little bit. He comes up to the register today with a basketful of groceries only to find that last nights storm took your systems down and you’re having some trouble getting things running again. The registers are working, but since you didn’t have a recent backup none of the barcodes are bringing up the right prices on any of the products. You tell Fred that it’ll only be a short wait, you just have to program in the prices for the items that he wants to buy. Fred walks out in a huff leaving his cart full of groceries where it sits. I think I can guess where he’s going, after all, he still needs groceries.
For a small business every single customer is important, which means that anything you can do to make sure your client stays happy should be done. Maintaining a backup is easy and fairly inexpensive, especially with the advent of Online Backups (where there’s no hardware cost). Yes, keeping backups will save you money in the long run, they will keep rolling in the face of a disaster, and they will keep you from crying over years of lost work. Maintain a backup for all of those reasons, but keep in mind that you really need to do it to preserve the trust that your clients put in you everytime they use your services.
Let me know where I missed the mark. Let me know where I was right on target. Comment below.
Dennis Edmondson Jr
Computing Concepts LLC
