One of the most important things for your business is your data. Programs and applications can be reinstalled, but once your data is lost, it's extremely hard to recreate. This is why we strongly encourage clients to back up their data and have a recovery plan. Losing your data can paralyze your business. It's better to take the time to prepare for an unlikely disaster than to look back and wish you had done something before. Things happen, and regardless how careful we are, we can fall victim to some unfortunate circumstances.

In case of data corruption/deletion, having a current backup can have your office functioning again in minutes vs. days and weeks of having to recreate and re-enter data.

Backing up your data will protect against:

• Viruses
• Theft
• Accidental deletion
• Computer crashes
• Physical damage to hardware
• Natural disaster
• Fires

Here are some things to think about for your data backup plan:

• Data should be backed up daily ensuring that if something were to happen you would never lose more than one day's worth of work. It is also a best practice to keep separate backups of month end and annual data.

• Where will you back up your data? It is important to have data available to you in case of a catastrophic failure that prevents you from getting to your computer. External hard drives are adequate, but they should not be left in the same physical location as your computer overnight. They also pose a security risk, should someone not authorized removes it from your location. There are many offsite cloud providers that can setup automatic backups daily at a minimal cost.

• Test your back-ups! It would be awful to invest time and effort backing up your data to realize it's not effective when it's too late. Test out your recovery regularly to make sure everything functions properly. You do not want to find out your backups have not been functioning when you are attempting to recover lost data.

• Share the plan with your key staff and make them aware of how to access and restore backup data. Bad things always seem to happen at the most inconvenient times! This way, if you are out of the office on business or vacation, the operations of your organization can return to normal without you having to physically be there.

We hope these tips encourage you to start backing up your data! Do you have any tips or questions? Leave a comment. We'd love to continue the conversation!

To view the original article, visit the Lone Wolf blog.

For a video tutorial on backing up your data, see How to Back Up Your Data!