What would you and your business do if you lost everything?
With just a click — deliberate or not — your entire digital world can disappear. And with it, untold dollars in lost revenue, not to mention the headaches and time spent in recovery mode.
Do you remember the last time you backed up your valuable business data? If not, it’s time to take action.
World Backup Day is on March 31, and it’s meant to forge good habits for the protection of your company’s digital data.
So why a World Backup Day? According to their website, 30 percent of people have never backed up their files, 29 percent of data losses are accidental, and one in 10 computers is infected with viruses each and every month. Wow!
I know of one xTuple ERP customer who experienced a near miss. We found out they had set up an internal backup (i.e., they had the database backing up to the same server, rather than off-site). We were asked to help them update to a newer xTuple version, and when we logged in to look, we found that their internal backup had stopped working months before. If they needed a backup, they’d have been out of luck. An internal backup is useless anyway if the hard drive is damaged due to a catastrophe.
If your backup is in-house, and it burns down, it’s gone. Cloud-based backups are the most economical and safest way of backing up for business, because it takes your data off-site and to another location.
As part of my responsibilities to superior service in xTuple Support, we ALWAYS recommend Off-site Backup and Disaster Recover Service to our business management software customers. It’s not a sale; it’s a salvation!
BC Wilson, our director of xTuple Cloud Services agrees: “Our most prudent customers use our off-site backup service, where we store a set of recent backups on a secure server in the cloud. That way, if their server drowns or explodes, they can get the data back right away.”
At a personal level, losing household data, pictures, music or messages might be frustrating or downright embarrassing, but in business, backups have a much higher financial impact if you don’t have them.
So take the xTuple version of the World Backup Day pledge with me:
“I solemnly swear to backup my essential business data every day in secure off-site cloud storage to prevent catastrophic business interruption.”
Monique Watkins
Software Engineer specializing in support and quality assurance. Monique graduated from Virginia's Longwood University with a B.S. in Business Administration, majoring in Computer Information Management Systems with a minor in photography. She's used the software since 2004 when she led the implementation of xTuple for one of the company's early customers. Monique then joined the xTuple team in 2008.