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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