Fail Safe: Backing Up Data

Posted : 07/01/2002

Computer Connections

Fail Safe
Regular Backups Can Prevent Catastrophic Information Loss

by Scott Eric Barrett

Computers are key tools in the day-to-day functions of most small businesses. Keeping track of payroll, customer memberships and trends was difficult in the client-card days, but imagine how tough life would be in the event of a computer-system crash.

Thanks to the wonders of computer technology, most salon operators abandoned hard copies of important information. This is potentially dangerous in the event of a system crash. Salon operators who stay up to date by running daily or weekly backups can survive disasters. Those who don't regularly back up their systems face a potential customer-service nightmare.

Mark Bell, co-owner of The Beach House in Bakersfield, Calif., says in order to have a backup, salon operators must have some type of storage device to save the backup copies of their data.

"You can use a tape drive, floppy disks, a Zip or Jaz drive, a CD burner, or you can even use your Internet connection to send data to a secure remote server," he says. "If you have backups of your data off-site, you won't lose your valuable company data in the event of a hard-drive failure."

When deciding exactly what needs to be backed up, everyone has a different opinion. If you can decide what you must be able to recover in the event of a system failure, that can help narrow your options for selecting a backup device, Bell says. He knows what he is talking about. He recently lost a hard drive at another business he runs. It just quit with no notice at all, he says.

"The PC was just over one year old, and I hadn't done a backup for about three weeks," he adds. "I lost all the data for three weeks that I will never get back."

Smart salon operators run backups every day, he concludes.

"I would suggest at least one full-system backup every day, because if you do lose a hard drive, although you will have your data, all your system configurations will be gone."

Marty Barker, co-owner of Tropical Sunsations in Syracuse, N.Y., says he uses a program called Novadisk that automatically performs backups every night.

"We will back up our main business files to a separate hard drive dedicated as a slave to the central server of our company," he says. "It also will back up to all workstations in the stores, which generally is two other computers. We do this so if for some reason the hard drive crashes on the main computer we will have quick access to backups. This, however, will not help in a major catastrophe."

To avoid catastrophes, Barker uses a CD-ROM burner to burn backups and takes the disk home with him.

"Each time we are in our stores we will connect our notebooks and drag and drop the files we need," he says. "We also use Novastor to do online backups automatically off-site over high-speed Internet connections each night."

So, if you backed up your system and are feeling pretty secure, you shouldn't. You also must test your backups at least once a month by restoring them to another computer. Installing software onto the test computer and restoring the data from the backup disks usually does this. You should look in the help file of your software or contact the software vendor for specific instructions on how to test your backups. Make sure you know how to restore your data and have written step-by-step instructions for your staff to follow.

Without a proper backup plan, a salon operator may find himself facing the worst-case scenario, Tropical Sunsations' Barker says.

"Backups are important because they are the life vests of your business that you worked so hard to build," he adds. "It is said that more than 80 percent of businesses that have catastrophic damage to their records without backups go out of business quickly following the accident."