By Ryan Williams
Building a business continuity plans is a lot like getting a root canal. You dread the experience, but you know that if you don’t go through with it, the consequences could be dire. In the case of avoiding a root canal, you could end up toothless. In the case of avoiding a business continuity plan, you could end up out of business. It’s not fun to think about, but it’s true. 7 out of 10 small firms that experience a major data loss go out of business within one year. Organizations that suffer data loss are exponentially more likely to fail and file bankruptcy, and the longer business operations are interrupted, the sooner bankruptcy will occur.
Think about it- every minute you spend recovering data costs you money, and every piece of information you have to recreate costs you money.
Business continuity plans help you map out how you will … Keep reading
By Gil Morris
In case you haven’t heard about Google Drive, this is a pretty slick feature upgrade for Gmail and Google Apps users whose Admins have this feature activated. Here’s the 411 on how I turned my Google Drive into a permanent backup solution for my personal documents and photos.
The 411
1. If you have a Google Apps or Gmail account, Sign up for Google Drive, and then download the Google Drive desktop client.
2. Once the client is installed, you’ll need the path to Google Drive folder to sync all docs and photos with Google Apps account. To do this, right-click on the Google Drive folder icon and select Properties (or open Windows Explorer and select Google Drive, then right-click to select Properties). Select the target path and press Ctrl+C to copy it to the Clipboard. It should look something like this (highlighted blue text):
3. Close the … Keep reading
By
Google has taken some heat lately for losing data from their customers’ Gmail accounts. This unfortunate incident highlighted the importance of data backups. What if we’re not so lucky next time, and all of your emails are permanently erased? One possible solution is a free download called Gmail Backup. This program is very easy to use. Here is a quick how-to.
1. Download and run the program on your computer.
2. Once the program has installed, open it and enter your Gmail account information.
3. Click on Directory to choose the folder you to use for backing up your emails. I created a folder called “Gmail Backup.”
4. Unless you wish to only save your newest emails, uncheck the “Newest emails only” box and select the date range you wish to use.
5. Click on Backup to begin your Gmail backup.
6. When the backup is complete, you may … Keep reading
By
Have you ever lost an hour of work on your computer?
Now imagine if you lost days or weeks of work–or imagine losing all your financial statements, tax returns and all the work files your company has ever produced or compiled.
Imagine what would happen if your network went down for days and you couldn’t access e-mail or the information on your PC. How devastating would that be?
Or, what if a major storm, flood or fire destroyed your office and all your files? Or if a virus wiped out your server…do you have an emergency recovery plan in place that you feel confident in?
How quickly do you think you could recover, if at all?
If you do not have good answers to the above questions or a rock-solid disaster recovery plan in place, you are quite literally playing Russian roulette with your business. With the number of threats … Keep reading
By
Generally, data retention is a trade-off between the costs of recovering data versus the costs of maintaining the data. Put another way, the less you spend maintaining the data, the more you’ll spend to recover it. For instance, tape backups are easy to maintain; however, data retrieval from tape is very labor intensive (expensive). Real-time email archiving on the other hand is automated, and the information can be retrieved very easily; however, there are costs associated with these archiving solutions (although minimal, we happen to offer a few).
The two primary reasons for investing in
By
Most people are surprised when we tell them that 100% of hard drives are going to fail at some point. That’s right. Hard drives all have moving parts and they will fail at some point. The best thing you can do is to backup your computer and back it up often. I suggest having multiple backups in multiple places (you can never have too many backups).
The key to getting frequent computer backups is for the process to be completely automated. In addition to the automated backups implemented at our firm, I also have my own backup routines scheduled. In the office I have an external USB hard drive connected to my laptop’s docking station. At noon a scheduled routine backs up my data to this USB drive. At home I have a shared folder on my home computer which I use for backups. At midnight an automated backup routine … Keep reading
