Do You Know Where Your Data Is?
December 6, 2010
Imagine all your data gone as of right this second! That’s what a hard drive crash feels like. Could your business survive it? Will you lose customers when they find out how you failed to protect their data they trusted you with?
Most small businesses start out using a single computer or a laptop as their main computer. Many are not doing a backup of any kind. They start backing up after their first major catastrophe.
Notebooks especially have a very sensitive hard drives are the highest rate of failure.
If you depend on your data, you should be backing up often. Just one day’s lost data can result in missed business opportunities, lost valuable contracts, pictures, and email.
In addition to the lost data, to rub salt in the wound, you will have to pay for data recovery and a hard drive or media to get you back up and running.
People don’t backup because it is time consuming, hard to remember, or they are not sure how or what to backup.
To save yourself the hassle you should consider a One Touch device. Once setup, you can come back to the office, connect the device and push the blue button. It is very quick and painless! This device can be used on more than one computer, so if there are several people with laptops or even different computers you can use one on all of them. I also guarantee it will cost less than what you will spend if you don’t backup.
Many people believe that if they backup just the “My Documents” folder they will have all their data. The “My Documents” folder is an alias to a real folder buried deep in the folder tree. There is also one for each user on your computer and they don’t contain ALL your data!
There are many very important files that are not kept in the “My Documents” folder. Hidden folders in the “Documents and Settings” directory that contain valuable information. For instance, your email files will NOT be contained in “My Documents.” Your email files for both Outlook and Outlook Express are stored in a hidden directory called “Local Settings/Application Data/Microsoft/Outlook/….”
Quickbooks and Peachtree are not stored in any of these locations and would be lost.
As a data recovery expert my best advice is Backup, Backup, Backup and make sure you know what you are backing up is complete.