Protect Your Business Data

As business owners who operate online businesses, data is very important to us. Many of us remember the days before autosave. You would work on a document and suddenly POOF, it’s gone. It could have been a power surge, the program shutting down, or an active child that couldn’t resist pushing the little blue button. Worse than losing a document, many of us have experienced hard drives failing and computers just not working. 

Fortunately, there are many ways to back up your data. You can use portable hard drives to back up entire computers or just flash drives to store a few documents. You can use electronic cloud services like Dropbox, One Drive, or Google Drive, which will allow you to access your information from any device. Unfortunately, we don’t always remember to back up data regularly.

Having a backup plan extends beyond just data. It includes having systems in place just in case something goes wrong.

Answer the questions below to see how much love you are showing your data.

• Have you backed up your computer in the last month?

• Do you have important files backed up in several places, including a flash drive?

• Have you changed your passwords in the last 6 months?

• Do you have printed hard copies of vital information?

• Do you have backup payment options to PayPal? 

• Do you back up your website on a regular basis?

Here are a few tips to help you create a backup plan for your business data and other systems:

Schedule a regular time every month to back up your computer and other data systems. You may want to back up more often depending on your workload. Always back up often during big projects.

Back up your website regularly.

Make sure you have more than one method of payment available. While PayPal is one of the most popular online merchant providers out there, make sure that you have other accounts such as Square or Stripe. These accounts are free to set up, and you only pay when a transaction is made.

Have products available on your site in addition to third-party sites. You can create beautiful online stores using third-party sites like Shopify, Etsy, and Square Spaces. However, you should also have your products available on your website as a backup. That way, if one of these sites is down for an extended period of time, you can promote the item on your site. This includes your books that are on Amazon as well.

Download your data from third-party sites regularly. Got thousands of people on your mailing list? Make sure that you export that data regularly. Who wants to rebuild their list from scratch?

Action Item: Make sure you have backup copies of important documents such as digital products, manuscripts, and your mailing list.