What Disaster Recovery Plan?
Do you have a disaster recovery plan for your business?
Uh huh. You’re probably just like 71% of small business owners — you don’t have one.
It might seem intimidating to put one together. I remember working on the mother of all disaster recovery plans in my corporate days. It felt like we were writing the sequel to War and Peace. But a disaster recovery plan doesn’t have to be that involved.
Office Depot has a guide for preparing a disaster recovery plan for smaller enterprises. It seems practical — not too complicated. The guide covers points such as keeping lists of vendors, having a supply of forms you use in your business available off-site, and backing up data.
As you are putting together a disaster recovery plan, keep in mind one of today’s important trends: online backup services. They back up your data continuously AND they store a copy of your computer files offsite. That way, if there is a fire or flood, you can recover your files almost instantly. And they are cost effective. Prices start at around $50 a year. I’ve heard good recommendations about Carbonite and Mozy, two such services.
Read the Office Depot guide to get started on your disaster recovery plan:
Expecting the Unexpected — Disaster Preparedness Strategies for Small Business.
May 25th, 2007 at 10:12 am
Online backup services are great for some off-line data, but also consider the benefits of having entire sets of your data stored on the web — full time. When you use online contact management applications, invoicing applications and others, you get this for free. It’s an often overlooked benefit to using online applications. Full disclosure: we provide an online invoicing and payment application, which obviously includes data backups and highly secured access to your data.
SimplifyThis.com
May 26th, 2007 at 9:41 am
Hi Sanjay, yes you bring up a good point.
One of my contractors had a computer crash recently. Luckily she used Yahoo for her email. She was able to reconstitute not only her important correspondence, but also almost 75% of her spreadsheets and Word documents, most of which had been sent or received as attachments via email.
Anita