With Hurricane Earl approaching my area, I've been doing the normal hurricane preparations. Things like buying food, water, batteries, and bringing all the outside toys inside.
Right now I'm being told that it could just be tropical storm conditions, but there is a chance it could move more inland and cause more problems. There could be power outages, and it's possible for roofs or buildings to be compromised. Ouch.
So what do we do as small businesses, when our entire business is on our computer? Well for one, I now have a laptop so I'll be packing that in the car, but it doesn't have all my valuable files on it. Those could easily be destroyed with a nice tree through the house, flooding, etc.
That's why it's crucial to have backups. And not just backups to an external drive, but to a remote location. It's dreadfully easy these days too.
I continue to recommend Jungle Disk (note no affiliate link here) because you can have it backup to Amazon S3 (which keeps multiple copies of every file in a way that it's near impossible to lose). Or you can have it backup to Rackspace which also is redundant but I'm not sure how much because I never read into it =P
The point being, I know that if my house were to be destroyed my business wouldn't. I could easily download any file necessary to continue. It would be difficult enough dealing with any kind of destruction but to add on top of that loss of important business documents or even family photos would just add to the devastation. Don't let it happen to you!
Just remember to do it BEFORE a disaster is coming your way, as it does take time to upload files to these remote locations. I have about 600GB of data that took 3 days initially to upload, and I have a full 20Mbps upload speed. Most internet connections have a high download speed, but a much slower upload speed.
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Thanks for the reminder of how important having remote backups are! I pray you don’t have anywhere near the conditions that we had during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Good luck, Tim! As residents of beautiful Venice, Florida and right on the Gulf of Mexico, we know what it means to get prepared for a major storm approaching. Lets all hope that you will be fine.
Best regards,
Toni Schaberick
Co-Founder/Co-Owner
LinkMommy.com
Venice, Florida
USA
I saw something on the news’ site last night talking about potential problems in Delaware and I wondered about you guys in Rhode Island. I hope nothing happens at all but will keep the Lindens in thoughts and prayers and hope for the best anyway.
Besides the remote backup, I have a couple of 1TB book drives that I use for backups. One is always in a safety deposit box and one at the house/office. When I do a new backup, I take that drive to the bank and swap it with the one stored there so my latest backup is always stored in a safe environment. Something I learned 20 or so years ago when it took me 8 (5.25″) floppy disks to backup my database daily for a business I owned.
Living in Oklahoma most of the year, I do not have to worry about hurricanes (a few have remained tropical storms this far North), but we do have more than our share of tornadoes…
Jungledisk? I’ve heard of that before but have never seriously checked that out. How does that compare when you include storage costs, to something like a mozy.com or carbonite.com ? I’ve heard good things about S3 as well.
Good point Tim, it is better to be safe than sorry. Hurricanes are nasty business. When you hear the corner of the roof raising up and slamming back down it really makes you think about what is important in life.
Thanks for the reminder. For my part, as a small enrepreneur, I only use free site like that in Microsoft. Jungledisk charge their members depending on for personal or for business matters.
Regards Tim
P.S. I wrote you about the SBP system of Jeff. Thanks for the feedback.
Thanks for bringing this point up, people take their computer disks for granted, when my last one died I was very lucky to have a chance to back up everything just days before it did, now I have software back up all of my important files to both another computer, and another server off-site
At your recommendation, I tried the jungledisk and absolutely LOVE it! It took about 4 days to upload 48GB of data via wifi and appears to be working great! Thank you, thank you THANK YOU!
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