In a perfect world, technology would work perfectly.

We know that’s not the case, so if you subscribe here or to our mailing list, we will send you tips and tricks a couple times a month (not more than weekly) to help eliminate your technology headaches. I’m not here to force you to buy something, I just want to inform you about things you can do to make an immediate impact in your small business.

Plus, if I take more than 3 minutes of your time, you can have 30 minutes of my time. You can’t get much more fair than that.

So, let’s talk about what you can do right this second to rescue your business. Check your backups. When we speak with people who have suffered data loss, we ask them what type of backup they had in place. The most common phrase seems to be, “Well, I didn’t think about it after I set it up.”

You either need to think about it, or you need to pay someone to think about it for you. Period.

The best rule of thumb for backups is:

Backup all your data that you cannot afford to lose, put at least one copy offsite, and test to make sure it is recoverable.

If you don’t have a backup and have one or two PCs, we recommend starting with Carbonite as a good introduction to backups. Simple, easy, cheap and great for home users and very small businesses. It has saved my personal data more than once. However, if you have more PCs or one of your PCs is rarely connected to the Internet, we should talk about some other options.

Whether it is your QuickBooks file, pictures of your children, or important emails, we all have data that would be disastrous to go missing. Having a backup doesn’t magically solve everything, you also have to know that it works properly. On a monthly basis, test a few files. Recover some files at random, and make sure you don’t get any errors. If they don’t recover or don’t match, finding out now is a lot better than finding out when you really need them.

We had a business call us after their server crashed. It turned out that their backup had stopped running almost a year previously. We were able to recover the data from the hard drives, otherwise they would have been out of business instantly.