You might ask yourself why it is important to have a backup of all of your data. Or, you might even ask yourself what is data, do I have any? Well, almost everyone has some sort of data on their computer, whether it be in the form of pictures, music, or documents (such as word, excel or pdf files). Let’s say you have a child, and they are 10 years old and you have all of your pictures stored on the computer. Do you have them saved anywhere else, if not what would you do if your hard drive failed, you got a virus such as the cryptowall virus – which encrypts all the documents, pictures, etc on your computer, the computer was stolen or a number of other possible ways that the data could be lost or destroyed.
It is always a good idea to have a backup of your data, whether it is for home or commercial use. We suggest you have a couple of copies of data, the one on the computer and maybe another copy on-site. But it is also a good idea to keep a copy of your data off-site as well, this way if there was a fire, tornado or some other major devastation that destroyed your home or office you would still have a copy of the data. If you are doing backups regularly onsite, then you are on a good step, but do you unplug your external drive or flash drive when not backing up your data? If not, if you got the cryptowall virus, chances are your backups on the external drive are also going to be encrypted.
We had 2 clients (both businesses) a while back who got this virus. They lost all of their data files in both cases. One of the businesses had our backups, so we were able to get them their data back in a day or 2. The other one had a backup, but the drive was plugged in and the backup was also destroyed by the virus. About 6 months later, there was finally a way to decrypt the encrypted files so we were able to recover the other files (this is not always the case) for them. Thing is, by this time they had to recreate many of their files in the meantime. This was a huge setback and very time consuming lesson. This other company has since started using our backup service that we offer.
Did you know that around 70% of businesses that have data loss go out of business a short time after? This is why, at least for a business, it is extremely important to have data backups.
We offer off-site data backups to customers. The nice thing about this software is it automatically runs each night (as long as there is an internet connection and the computer is on) and backs up the data on its own. This way you don’t have to wait around while your data is copying across, after hours or before work. Using our service, the data is stored encrypted in the cloud and is HIPAA compliant.
So, what are some basic benefits of data backups?
- Comfort – knowing if something happens to your computer or server, there is a backup that can be restored
- Convenience – Ability to have the backups run at night, and not have to worry about copying data across to a flash drive and then having to find out where to store the flash drive.
- Recovery – Knowing that your files are backed up, so if something happened they can be recovered in a relatively short time (depending on how much data you have)
- Revisions – You can have a couple of revisions saved, so if you made a mistake in a document and realize it the next day, you could go back 2 version to get the mistake taken care of without having to try to remember exactly what it was
- If backed up, your pictures will also be safe
If you are interested in off-site data backups, give us a call at 218-744-1210.