“Do you have any rice?”

A panicked elementary school teacher was rushing around begging colleagues for rice. She had just dropped her smartphone into a toilet while on bathroom duty and hoped to use the rice to “suck” the moisture out of her device.

It works. Sometimes.

Dropping your smartphone somewhere you wish you hadn't and figuring out how to save your data — it’s a scene that plays out around the world probably thousands of times each day. We keep so much on our devices these days like photos, contacts, and other valuable personal data. When our desktop or laptop computers crash, the consequences are usually far more dire as most of our data is stored there. And this is especially true for small business owners.

To remind us of the importance of backing up our data – whether it’s on our computers, our smartphones, our tablets or our laptops – March 31 is World Backup Day. If you pause for a moment to reflect on this, you may realize that March 31 is April Fool’s Day Eve; if you’re one of those who still refuse to establish a robust backup system, when April 1 arrives, you can include yourself among the “fools.”

Let me ask you a simple question: If there were two convenient banks where you could deposit the money you bring in with your small business and one was FDIC insured and the other wasn’t, would you patronize the non-insured bank? Of course not. Even if you believed a bank failure was a small risk, you would go with the safe bank.

It’s somewhat the same with managing the risk to your data. But here’s the difference: While you may think the risk is low, it’s probably much higher than you realize. Millions of computers and hard drives will crash this year and thousands of small businesses will be hit by hackers.

Failing to manage this risk is a significant management failure!

Here are a few of the hazzards as well as what you can do about them.

Assess the risks.

The first step in any backup plan is to determine what you need to backup. Some users may simply decide that they want their entire systems backed up. But even if that’s your approach, it’s important to know which data on your system are really important. A small business owner should take extra security measures with those data – financial, personnel, legal documents or work products for example.

No matter which of the following backup approaches you decide to take, you’ll probably want to separately archive some files. Accounting files for tax purposes, for example, should be kept separately at some point. You won’t need to access them regularly, so there’s no need to expose them to additional risks by including them with your daily backup. Archiving them on a medium or device separate from your standard backup system – and stored off site – is the preferred approach.

Be prepared for hardware failures.

Internal and external hard drive failures have been a risk since the beginning of the personal computer revolution. (Who can remember floppy disk failures? Some of you can, I’m sure!)

The simplest approach to preventing a disaster when a local hard drive fails is to be backing up locally. This can be another drive tethered to your computer or over your local network. There are good drives on the market that are designed for this purpose. They should be RAID (redundant array of independent disks) drives, which means they have “mirrored” drives inside the box. If one drive fails, the mirrored drive takes over and you can simply pull out the bad drive and slide in a new one, restoring redundancy.

The weakness in these local systems is the fact that they are local. If you have a fire or a vandal, you can lose everything even though you’ve been conscientiously backing up your data. And this is why it’s important to know which data is critical: If you settle on a local system, you should transfer critical data to removable media on a frequent schedule and take it off site.

Backup using the cloud.

There are many ways to backup to the cloud today. You can:

Sign up for a commercial service.
Buy your own hardware and setup your own cloud backup system.
Use Dropbox (or a similar provider that has a free entry-level offering).

Because your data are stored off site, a cloud-based backup system is really the best way to go today. With a lot of competition in this area, it’s not too expensive and it solves a lot of your problems. However, it’s still a good idea to identify your mission-critical files and keep secondary copies of those in addition to what you’re backing up to the cloud. I say this for two reasons: It gives you additional protection against viruses and hackers, as well as against regular old data corruption.

Protect data against hackers.

Hackers, viruses and especially ransomware are on everyone’s mind these days, so the question is: Will backing up my data protect me against these threats?

The answer is a definite maybe. It depends on how sophisticated the threat is and how your data are being backed up. For example, many of the ransomware attacks lock up specific data files, like dot-docx or dot-xlxs. Many backup systems will build archives with different file extensions and those will be safe. However, some more advanced ransomware may lock up those archives.

Experts generally agree that using a good commercial cloud backup system gives you added protection against these evil doers, but unfortunately it’s not a 100-percent guarantee. Where does this leave us? It brings us back around to the point of why it is so important to be making secondary backups of your most important data!

Think mobile.

Back to the teacher fishing out her smartphone from the toilet and asking for rice. Most of the tips here center around traditional desktop or laptop computers. However, many small businesses are becoming increasingly dependent on mobile computing devices – smartphones and tablets.

Don’t overlook these as you design your backup system. If they are backed up to a traditional computer, is the drive on that computer adequately backed up? If they are tied into a cloud storage system, do you have the login and password information you would need if the device is lost, stolen or dies at the bottom of a toilet bowl?

Need more advice to protect your business or assess risk?

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About the author

Susan Solovic is THE Small Business Expert. A woman of many talents, Susan Wilson Solovic is an award-winning serial entrepreneur, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Amazon.com top 100 and USA Today bestselling author, media personality, sought-after keynote speaker, and attorney.

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