1) My IT support person takes care of that… I think.
Please tell me, what confirmation do you have that your critical and proprietary information is stored securely off-site every day? “Well,” you say, “maybe not every day, but I know my computer is being backed up, somehow, on a semi-regular basis. That’s part of what my IT guy does.”
My advice: Act quickly to take control of your information, because your livelihood depends on your survival. The key is to employ a service that monitors your backup every day and sends you a daily email confirmation that your backup completed successfully.
You can include your IT person in the process, because he/she ought have a recommendation for a reputable offsite data backup service. They might prefer you use a hardware solution like an external hard drive to manually (I repeat: manually) back up their computers, but that’s because they think they have a higher margin on hardware sales. . Tea better IT support staff already have relationships with trusted online backup services, so they feel good about helping you protect your business using the better solution. Don’t rest until you can say with confidence: “Yes, my computers are backed up on secure external servers 365 days a year.”
2) I don’t have time to do my daily backup. Once a month is enough.
Picture this: You always do your monthly backup on the last day of the month. Too bad your computer crashed unexpectedly on the 29th. That’s 29 days of progress down the tubes. And guess what? Computer accidents are always unexpected.
3) My assistant does my backup daily, except for the days she works from home, is on vacation, or is on sick leave.
You know what they say about Murphy… he’s a real devil. When the accident occurs, it will most likely happen on the tenth day of his assistant’s two-week vacation. This is how Murphy acts.
4) I already do data backup. (Yes, this is an excuse for NO making daily backups).
I’ve heard this more times than I’d like to admit. But in 99% of cases, it’s an outright lie and the easiest way for business owners to dismiss me and avoid thinking about computer backup altogether. This excuse comes from the minds that have fallen deep into the trap of relying on technology to keep working as it should. My Arthur Kaljian calls this friend the “myth of the toaster.” You know, like your fancy computer still works like your 15-year-old toaster still does. These are the entrepreneurs that concern me the most.
5) All I really need to back up is my accounting, and my accountant stores those files for me once a year.
Again, having to recreate 6 or 8 or 11 months of accounting records would be a nightmare. Consider this: On average, it takes 21 days and $19,000 to re-enter 20 megabytes of accounting data. Sounds like something your business could easily handle and survive? I sure wouldn’t want to test that theory.
6) I am an entrepreneur. I’m busy networking, knocking on doors, and fighting for business. My company really isn’t big enough to need a daily computer backup.
If this is your excuse, you are certainly not alone. Statistics show that 40% of small businesses in Canada never back up their computers… not even once (balloon and mail, May 16, 2007). But the truth is that independent business owners work harder than most business owners and over 70 hours a week, certainly more than the average employee. So how many of these 70+ hours are spent collecting names for your growing contact database? How would you feel if you lost that database and how much is it worth to you? I’d be willing to bet that your database is many times more valuable than the cost of a daily online computer backup.
7) I work on a laptop, which I take home every night, so my computer is off site.
This is a bit of a laugh. I can’t help but smile when I hear this excuse because, in a way, they’re right. But here’s the scary fact: 2,000 laptops are stolen every day in North America. They are stolen from cars, from the check-in line at the airport, from your office while you are in the bathroom, or, God forbid, from your home. And laptops become the unfortunate targets of spilled cups of coffee or heavy bumps in transit. If anything, your laptop is more at risk of data loss than your desktop, and it’s certainly not an external solution you should rely on.
8) My computer is brand new, so I’m not worried about backing it up yet.
This would seem to be the most logical of all excuses for not backing up your computer daily. And that’s why it’s been one of the hardest excuses for me to get over. That is until February 2007, when Google Corporation. published its widely discussed white paper entitled Failure trends in a large population of disk drives. According to this study, which is the largest of its kind ever conducted, hard drives are more likely to fail if they are less than 3 months old or more than 2 years old. In other words, if you think daily computer backup is unnecessary because your computer is new, you might be in for a terrible surprise. The bottom line is that it’s impossible to predict how soon your computer might fail.
9 and 10) Daily offsite backup is too expensive and not in my budget this year.
This excuse gets two places on the list because it is the most common and the most dangerous. This excuse is largely responsible for the fact that 70% of small businesses that suffer a major data loss go out of business within a year (balloon and mailMay 16, 2007).
Why work so hard to build your business to its current level of success, only to have all that work go up in smoke, stolen, or wiped off a hard drive? Ask yourself: how many hours a day do I spend working on my computer? Then he asks: how much is my time worth? Is your time worth $50/hour, $100/hour, or $200/hour? Because the multiplication of these two answers is just the beginning of the expenses you’ll rack up if you have to recreate all your information from scratch. It doesn’t matter the opportunity cost of lost time, or the embarrassment of contacting your customers to let them know you’ve lost their personal information, or the amount of business you’ll lose as a result.
Most small businesses can avoid this disaster by committing to a daily computer backup strategy for less than $300 a year. For example, as of July 31, 2007, my average customer paid $287.05/year to have all their critical information automatically backed up to secure offsite servers 365 days a year. If you need to beg, borrow, or, well, borrow $24.00 a month to protect the future of your business, then that’s exactly what you need to do.
So please take action today to protect your information, because no excuse is worth losing your business.