I have seen many small business owners panic as their primary storage devices fail them and they don’t have a backup or any crisis continuity plan in place. It is very important for every small business to make regular backups of important data to keep on site and to store remotely either online or at another location on CDs, DVDs or external drives.
Advice for failures
When hard drives fail (and they will) don’t panic. If you don’t have a back up of your data make sure you shut down the system and call a qualified data recovery professional. Remember that there is little you can do if your drive is failing because most of the time you will cause more damage to your valuable data.
Don’t take your hard drive somewhere that doesn’t specialize in data recovery. When in doubt ask your prospective repair shop or data recovery firm about the symptoms you experienced, make sure to note any error messages you saw and relay them. Try to get an estimate if you can.
Backing up
I recommend starting off with an external hard drive and an online backup service for your backups. Don’t use the external drive or the online backup as your only copy. Have three copies at all time. One on your computer, one on the external drive and one online. How often you back up is up to you. Just remember that if you lose your data you won’t have but the most recent copy you last backed up so frequency is important.
Next level
You may also consider RAID configurations, network attached storage and multiple online backup locations if redundancy and continuity of business operations are mission critical.