Backups - a cautionary tale

I suffered a fatal and permanent hard-drive failure the other week. My hard drive simply stopped working. I won’t bore you with the sorry tale of the next few days, but I do want to say a word about... backups. If you’re part of a larger business, somebody else is probably taking care of backups. If you’re a solo worker or a small business, the job of backing up your PC is most likely down to you. It’s possible that you don’t give this issue much of a thought – but you should.

Imagine... tomorrow morning you sit down at your PC. You push the start button, but within moments, you’re staring blankly at the ‘blue screen of death’.... Something’s gone badly wrong.

If the critical fault has resulted, as it did with me, in total loss of all the data on your hard-drive, you could be facing a crisis - depending on the state of your computer backup. So, how healthy is your backup at this precise moment? What client or customer data or projects are not fully backed-up? What sort of backups do you keep of your customer contact database, email or diary appointments?

I was reasonably fortunate. It was my habit to do a weekly backup, which I had thought was sufficient. My backup data was actually not very badly out of date, and it wasn’t too much trouble to retrieve the few missing items. Even so, I now do a daily backup instead, as I no longer feel my weekly strategy is good enough.

Your personal backup strategy must be based on the assumption that the worst can happen, and that if it does, you and your business would be able to pick up where you left off. If you can’t afford to lose it, make sure it’s properly backed up. If it would cost you valuable time, money or credibility if you lost it, back it up. If it would leave your life, work, finances or commercial relationships in chaos if you lost it, make a backup. And then keep it up-to-date.

25th May 2009