Protecting your computer system and your data is just as important today as it has ever been. Use of antivirus and antispyware applications is commonplace, yet equally important is maintaining timely backups of your data.
It’s Monday morning, the first Coffee of the day hasn’t yet found its mark. A busy week awaits, and the project you’d nearly finished on Friday just needs that last few details adding before you submit it to the boss at the morning meeting. You blearily fire up your trusty computer only to be greeted with a sight dreaded since the dawning of the IT age. The Blue Screen of Death and five little words:
A Problem has been detected.
Several Ctrl+Alt+Delete’s, three or four restarts and a stream of colourful language later you ring IT. And that’s when Monday morning gets worse still. No backup was taken on Friday. Or the Friday before. Or the one before that. Ooops…
****
Computers break. Files get corrupted. Things go wrong. Despite all this, a recent study by Symantec discovered that the average small or mid-sized business only backs up 60% of its company and customer data and that the end cost of computer outages averages over £10k per day.
Protecting your computer system and your data is just as important today as it has ever been. Use of antivirus and antispyware applications is commonplace, yet equally important is maintaining timely backups of your data. The following list of best practices is recommended for full system protection.
- Keep antivirus, antispyware, and other forms of malware defenses up to date. Automatic updates are highly recommended.
- Schedule backups. Implement and enforce backup schedules and automate the process as much as possible. Manual processes are prone to error, and worse forgetfulness.
- Back up systems as well as data. Backups are only as good as your ability to use the information you recover, so back up systems and applications as well as files.
- Test your backup periodically.Don’t wait until disaster strikes to discover a resource, process, or technical shortcoming. Test your backup by recovering an important file and testing its validity.
- Keep backups offsite. Fires, floods, theft and vandalism are unfortunate facts of life. Protect against them by separating the computer from the backup, be that a tape or a cloud based solution.
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Get help. Find an IT partner who understands and can help with both your business and technical requirements, and whom you trust.
At High Peak Systems we have experience of setting up and maintaining successful backup strategies for companies of all sizes, from single sites in the UK to multi national organisations with sites in different time zones and localities. If you want to review your backup systems or would like to discuss data protection strategies further, please contact us