Nowadays, a lot of businesses are done in an office with computers. As a result, valuable and sensitive data such as customer information, revenue report, market analysis and employee workloads are stored on those computers or backup storages.
However, before newly added data is transferred or backed up, there are chances that accidents may happen. For example, before the new important information is backed up to the cloud storage or backup drives, they are accidentally deleted. Therefore, it is incredibly essential for business owners to have a recovery plan in place to regain important business files.
How to prepared your business for the unexpected?
Many companies have various plans to ensure data security and minimize the loss during any data loss disasters. The common actions will be introduced below.
Back up to different storages regularly
This is more like a precaution measure instead of a recovery plan, but it is actually a fundamental step before any recovery plan can be applied. For individuals, people usually choose to back up their computers hourly, daily or even weekly using an external hard drive or cloud storage. But for businesses, even hourly backup is not sufficient. Imagine how much data are transferred and stored every hour for a big company? It is recommended that core information should be backed up and several copies should be uploaded to physical disks, servers and cloud services every a few minutes.
Minimize unauthorized handling of important information
Accidental deletion happens more often than you expect and becomes the first reason for data loss. With more people, especially those who don’t acquire enough knowledge of the importance and value of the pieces of documents, handling the files, the risk of accidental deletion will increase. As a result, companies should strictly limit the number of people who can access the core information. In addition, make sure they can’t easily delete or edit the files by setting up different permissions.
Utilize anti-virus software often
Virus infections and malware attacks can cause severe data loss because the lost information may never be retrieved. Even worse, malicious attacks may cause data breach. Companies should be equipped with professional anti-virus software or service to protect data from corruption or stolen.
Train employees
One trick for data recovery is to act fast as soon as you realize the important data is deleted or lost. If you keep writing to the computer or external disks, the original data may be overwritten and become unrecoverable. In a real-life case, people won’t notice that some important documents are mistakenly deleted or missing for days. To make things worse, they usually don’t get hands on recovery instantly but keep doing their work. Companies need to educate employees about the data recovery and tell them to stop using the computer or disks immediately. Moreover, every employee should be responsible for regularly checking the stored key working files to make sure they are safe and sound.
Cooperate with data recovery services
If data loss accidents unfortunately happen and backup copies can be found nowhere, asking professional data recovery services for help is the right way to do. Many big companies have fixed data security experts or companies to work with. It is of course costly but necessary. For small business owners, it is strongly suggested to invest in professional data recovery software and perform data recovery by themselves. Most developers provide a technician edition for multiple computers (usually 5) with a lifetime license. It will be enough for small businesses most times. When selecting such a tool, be aware of some key features such as usability and compatibility. Most importantly, purchase one that supports restoring files from unbootable Mac computers or Windows computers.
Conclusion
Data backup and recovery is increasingly crucial for business owners no matter how big or small the business is, because the work interacts with computers so much. Having a good recovery plan will help the company avoid serious information loss and recover them successfully with little cost.
