Life Challenges Can Create Havoc With Your Business - Accessing And Protecting Data During A Crisis

How prepared are you for a crisis?

Unexpected life challenges occur in many categories:

1. Fires

2. Floods

3. Earthquakes

4. Burglary

5. Accidents

6. Illness

7. Technology Failure

With the recent California fires and previous disasters throughout the world, it reminds me of just how vulnerable we are to environmental crises. These emergency circumstances not only affect our personal safety and our homes, but can also have devastating effects on our businesses.

One particular area of concern is loss of data for our business. Think of how it would be if you lost everything on your hard drive. Some of you may have already had this experience if your computer hard drive failed. If you did not have backup, you had a lot of pieces together to do of not only documents, but also contact information and perhaps an online calendar.

A few years ago I had the experience of my Outlook crashing due to too much data saved on the program. Something I didn't know about Outlook 2000 is that it has a limit of how much data it can hold. I had all my contacts, email, and calendar on Outlook without any backup. I felt paralyzed to do anything with my business. I was able to view current incoming mail on the web email available with my server, but could not view any past emails.

Fortunately, I was able to access the data with the help of their technical support team. I immediately went out to purchase a PDA so that I would be able to sync all my information from the computer to the handheld scheduling device. I also signed up with an online backup system so that all of my files would be backed up on a daily basis.

What about documents that you may have in hard copy or on your computer hard drive? Essential documents that you have only in hard copy should be scanned and saved. Having them only on your hard drive is not secure enough. You can have these available to you even if your computer crashes, is stolen, burned, flooded, etc. without even using a portable flash storage device that could also not be available.

Using Google Photo or one of the many photo storage sites, you can upload the digital files of your scanned documents for no cost. These can be accessed from any computer connected to the internet.

You can upload web pages, word, excel, power point, and text documents to Google Documents. You can set these so anyone can access and edit or keep them private. As a precautionary measure I've uploaded all of my web pages to the documents. There is also a feature that will update your document anytime you change something on your website. Pretty cool! Photos are not shown on the pages, however. You'll need to save these separately to Google Photo.

I like using Google mail for most of my correspondence so that I have access to all my current and past email. There is no limit to their storage size and they have an easy search tool to find any mail you need for reference. Service has no charge and if seeing Google ads next to your email doesn't bother you, it is a good choice. I often forward mail from my Outlook email account to Gmail so I have it available for reference no matter what.

Finally, for financial records, Quick Books' online option is a great way to have access to all of this information no matter where you are. There is a charge for this after your initial trial period. It also makes it possible for a virtual assistant or bookkeeper to have access to do work for you.

Putting some thought into all the aspects of your business that would be affected in a crisis situation can save you lots of frustration and money. Time and money for some of these services put into these preparations is a great investment toward your Healthy Bottom Line.

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The basis of data protection is simply backing up your data. All areas on your disk should be backed up regularly. A complete backup program consists of the follows steps:

- Backing up the drive type (if you are using an older system or hard drive i.e (the MBR including the FAT daily), system files and the user data (regularly), making an "emergency" boot floppy for each system and taking precautions to minimise the probability of an accidental format and it is also very important that you

- regularly defragment the data to ease any data recovery tasks, take advantage of verification features of the operating system and applications if applicable. Keep at the back of your mind the threat posed by computer viruses and knowledge of how to protect your computer and data. The safest way to avoid computer viruses is to use an excellent antivirus and update it regularly.

- Also of great important is the CMOS information of your hard drive type. Document specifications for the drive (heads, sector and you will always be able to enter the data into your new system and get the drive to work.

Backing up system files cannot be overemphasised. Your operating system' s default systems files, includes configuration files that directs the operating system on how to work and how your applications should work with it. If you loose these files you may come to a dead end. If you are concerned about data integrity, backup regularly and quickly too.

I wonder how many of you have backed up your hard disk in the last seven days or one month. There are two kinds of hard disk users: the ones who have had a disk failure and lost data that wasn't backed up and the ones who are going to loose data. You should endeavour not to be among any of the users because it would be a disaster to loose vital information.