Your data may be the most valuable part of your business, but you won’t realise that probably until it is too late. Instead of adapting the ostrich approach (head in the sand, if I don’t know anything about it it won’t happen to me 🙂 rather look at these easy ways to back up your data successfully for any eventuality.
There are various online services that are easy and safe to use, but the rule is if you haven’t backed up in more than one place, you haven’t backed up at all.

 

Read what happened to Dave Verwer who lost his entire office building in a fire, but thanks to good backup practices he did not lose any of his data and could continue with his business. Others in his building were not so lucky!

 

Services Dave recommended:

  • Dropbox. I store my entire Documents directory on Dropbox and work from it every day. The instant that I save a file it is uploaded onto my Dropbox and automatically synced with 2 other machines as soon as they are switched on. This gives me 4 copies of my data at all times, all stored in separate physical locations. This is by far the lowest friction services I use for backups as I do not need to do anything to backup my data and I can not recommend it strongly enough, sign up right now.
  • Gmail and Google Calendar. Since starting Shiny Development in 2006, we have used Google Apps (mainly Gmail and Google Calendar) to manage all of our email and calendaring. Every email I have sent or received is available from anywhere I can find a browser and all stored securely by Google. If you are still using non-web mail then you really need to change.
  • FreeAgent. We have only recently signed up with FreeAgent but we now store all of our business quotes, invoices, client details, expenses (including receipts) and accounts with this service. I finally signed up after glowing recommendations from several friends, and I recommend you do too.
  • Github. Every piece of source code written since we founded our business is now stored in Github. The IP in our source code is our most important asset and I do not consider source code to really exist until it is pushed to Github and then pulled in at least one other location (usually my laptop). The pushing/pulling of source code is the only manual process in my backup strategy but source code is so key to what I do every day it has become pure habit to always push at the end of the day. (I also have a post-commit hook on Github which clones my important repositories across to Codebase HQ whenever I push to them as a final belt and braces backup of really important source code!)

 

What about all your data that are stored on social media sites like facebook or twitter? I back up social media data using backupify. They also send me weekly reports so I can verify that it has been done.

backups dropbox FreeAgent Github