Ever had a hard drive crash with no backup then tried to get a quote from recovery specialists to retrieve the data?

I used to work with a guy who spent time with a data recovery services company. Their price tag for data retrieval from damaged disks was around the 5 figure mark. I raised my eyebrows when he told me the fee and he simply asked:

“well, how much is your data worth?”

.. his point being that if your entire business is stored on your hard drive and you have no backup, then it may be a small price to pay to get it back. He was right.

According to a report on Emarketer, nearly half of US adults don’t back up their data. How many of those people would be small business owners it doesn’t say, but I’m sure that quite a few of us have no backups or very old ones.

What about your web site? Are you totally reliant upon your web hosting provider’s backups? Read the fine print of your contract - you’ll likely find there’s an escape clause along the lines of “all care taken, but no responsibility assumed”. I have personally witnessed of the world’s most highly regarded dedicated hosting companies fry a primary hard drive, then fry the backup drive shortly afterwards through human error.

The results of data loss are not only inconvenient and frustrating, but can be devastating to your business - pick up some backing up tips in my article; Backups and online business - trust no-one.