There are 2 kinds of business people – those who back up and those who wish they had.

I recommend being one of those who secures their business by backing up regularly. Not backing up your assets can cost you a lot of money, customers, stress, disappointment, and frustration.

What is “backing up” and what is the best way to do it?

Backing up your assets means creating multiple copies – hard copies and digital copies of your computer files, pictures, music, videos, software programs, and your WEBSITE. In other words, it means SAVING your assets in multiple locations so you don’t lose your hard work, and valuable assets like pictures, videos, software programs and other digital items you would like to keep.

Where are the best places to save your assets?

• Your computer, if you have enough space. If you don’t I recommend upgrading your computer hard drive and RAM (less expensive) or buying a new computer (more expensive) depending on your needs.
• USB sticks – These are handy devices that are small and easy to store or bring with you when you leave your home or office. I store my files on multiple USB sticks – each one for a different file type and bring them with me wherever I go.
• External hard drive – This is basically a huge USB stick. Mine is a big rectangle that I connect to my computer via a USB cable. It can hold 2TB (terabytes) of data, which is 2000 GB (gigabytes). This I keep at home at all times.
• Cloud storage platform – It is always good to keep a cloud version of your files, in case something happens to your physical copies or you don’t have them with you and need them when you are away from home. There are many cloud storage platforms you can use like Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, DropBox and others.

*I use all 4 back-up methods. Why?

I save a cloud copy, in case something happens to my hard copies, so I always have a copy. It’s also good if I am out of the house and I don’t have my computer or external hard drive with me, and I want to access my files. I never leave the house without my USB sticks, but, should something happen to them while I am out, or should they stop working properly for some reason. I use the external hard drive as it contains all of my files, instead of having them broken up into multiple USB sticks, of which one or more of them can fail. I save the set-up copies of the applications on my computer and all of my files so I can easily can quickly access them whenever I use my computer.

I also like to have multiple copies in case I forget to save it to one of them. What could happen to cause damage to my storage devices? My house could burn down; my cloud account could get hacked by ransomware or the whole cloud storage platform could crash; my purse, which contains my USB sticks, could get stolen or damaged when out of the house; my computer could get hacked, damaged or crash for another reason.

While it is unlikely that all of the negative scenarios will happen at all or happen all at the same time, I would rather not take the chance. I remember when I went back to school as a mature student about 20 years ago, I spent many hours completing a project for a class at the library, using their computer. I forgot to save my work regularly while I was working on it, and my time expired on the computer and shut down. I lost all of that work. It was devasting.

The same thing can happen on your computer, if you don’t have it set up to automatically save to the cloud or save it to an external device as you are working on it. If your computer crashes, starts updating itself or Microsoft or the other word processing software you are using has a glitch with it and needs to shut down, you will have lost all of your work.

If you are out of the house doing work on your computer and have no internet access, and have no USB sticks or an external hard drive with you to save your files on, and something happens to your computer, you may lose all of your files.

I hope you get the idea.

What about your website?

Have you ever taken a physical back-up of it?

Most people will say, No, to that question. Are you one of them?

It’s true that website hosting companies take digital back-ups of your website, typically on multiple servers, so they can restore it should they platform get hacked or crash for another reason. But, this is not enough. Hackers are very smart, and it is possible that all back-ups your hosting company does for you may get compromised at some point. I know a website development company owner who was a reseller of a big hosting company’s hosting services. This is how small companies sell hosting – they pay for extra space on a hosting company’s server, and rent it out as if it’s their own. His company was hosting over 100 websites, and the big hosting company’s servers got compromised and all of his client’s websites were lost. That was terrible for all of his clients who lost their websites for a period of time, and for his company that had to rebuild all of the sites. I think he may have even been sued by some of the companies due to the lost revenue that happened due to the time between when their websites crashed and when they were finished being rebuilt. His company still hosts websites, but, they don’t use that big hosting company anymore, and I hope they take physical back-ups of those sites regularly.

One of GTApreneurs website clients had us build him a new site as his former site lost all of its edits to the underlying template that was used to build the website. So, when he and others went to his website, it was all dummy text and pictures that had nothing to do with his business and CTA links that didn’t work. He used the company who built his site to host his website. But, the problem was, when my client noticed his site was not right, he couldn’t get a hold of the company owner or any representative from that company to fix it. He tried for 2 weeks to no avail. It cost him over $4000 for us to build him a new site. Had he had gotten physical back-ups of his website from that company he could have drastically reduced the cost to restore his website. We would have set him up with a new hosting company, one that has reps available 24/7 and uploaded his site to their platform using the physical copy.

I try to remember to back-up gtapreneurs.com at least once a week, as we constantly update it and have customers making purchases on it. It would actually be better if I took several back-ups throughout the week, however, I hope that between my weekly back-ups and the daily backups my hosting company takes will be enough to save most or all of the information.