This isn’t idle scaremongering. It’s a fact. More than half of businesses fail to maintain an adequate data back-up system. Irretrievable data loss can, quite literally, spell the death of your business. Imagine for a moment that, in the blink of an eye, your customer records, financial systems, VAT and tax returns, business documents and email system have all disappeared - forever. It happens. What effect would this have on your livelihood?   The fact is in the printing and design trade critical information is no longer retained on paper. For convenience it is stored exclusively as digital data.  And here lurks the danger...

Power loss, fire, flood, theft, sabotage, virus infection, hard drive failure or system crash.  Which will it be? Or, just as commonly, plain human fallibility, such as the over-zealous research scientist who drilled a hole into his hard drive and poured oil into it because it was squeaking! 

Everyone thinks data loss is someone else’s problem. But as predictably as death and taxes sooner or later it’s going to happen to you. On what scale it’s impossible to predict, and hopefully when it does occur it won’t be too damaging.  The crucial trick, of course, is to anticipate the inevitable.  Here’s how:

Get offsite backup. To be properly protected it does no good to have your backup sitting in the drive of a machine that is then damaged or stolen.

Don’t create points of risk. If you have a member of staff managing your backups and he or she is taking them home, what happens if that person is off sick, quits or disappears? What happens if the backups are lost or stolen? Your backed up data needs to be accessible to more than one employee or you have otherwise unwittingly created a new point of risk.