As a small business owner you most likely find yourself very busy running daily operations, taking care of finances, personnel, and marketing. That typically leaves very little time to make sure that you computer is running at its maximum capacity. You probably have thought about the need for data backup, but either think it's too cumbersome to manage or never get to it.



Then one day, your computer crashes and you are left with... nothing. This could be very damaging to your business and very time consuming to restore the information, if it is even restorable. Many people who do experience a computer crash, become dedicated data "backupers" after the fact. Here is your chance to learn about the best options available and setup your backup system before you have a major crash.

The two main categories of the backup are local or web-based. With the local backup you can copy data to a CD if you have a CD-RW drive, copy data to an USB drive or to an external hard drive. You can either do it manually that is probably not an option for most of us due to the perpetual lack of time or you can use a software like Norton 360 to schedule it.

The web-based options include backing up your data manually to your ftp site if you own a website or setting up an automatic service with one of the providers. From personal experience, backing up manually is typically not an option. We've tried it, but still managed to loose data in the last crash (which was pricey to recover). The best option in our opinion is the "set and forget" service. There are two main providers that we would like to bring to your attention: idrive and mozy.

With both idrive and mozy you can get a free automatic backup with both companies for up to 2GB! If you need more space, you would need to pay $4.95. Both companies provide you with secure data transfer and an easy interface. You can schedule to back up every hour, every day or as often as you want.

Idrive doesn't delete your data from their site even if you delete the file from your computer. Both sites offer you versioning - saving different versions of the same file. With Idrive you can even map the drive and access the data just like it was on your computer. And what's the best, the service does all the work for you.

We hope you find our quick data backup overview helpful. Don't procrastinate signup with one of the companies today! Data recovery services are an expensive option, you definitely want to avoid! Keep your small business running smoothly!