How Do I Backup My Computer and Other Online Business Saftey Advice
My online business almost suffered a major setback this past week. If you follow me on twitter ( http://twitter.com/susannemyers ) you know I’m working on another short report and I also tend to write a lot of my blog posts, articles etc in Word and save them on my main laptop. It’s a little over two years old and often on 14-15 hours per day. It really didn’t come as much of a surprise that it started to die on me.
Thankfully I had a little bit of warning and I have a great friend (Nicole Dean) and a tech savvy husband. Between the two I was able to save all my crucial files to a spare hard drive we had laying around (thanks to the tech savvy husband who actually does back up stuff regularly and keeps a few external hard drives around for that purpose).
But what if my computer had crashed without some warning, be it because of hardware malfunction, a virus, or some coffee or soda being spilled on it?
The coffee thing actually happened to a good friend of mine who also works on one of my websites. About 6 months ago I got a frantic text message from her saying that her son had spilled coffee all into her laptop and she would be down for a few days until she could get a new one.
Either scenario can be quite the nightmare, especially if you end up losing weeks and weeks worth of work. Thankfully I only lost a few hours worth last week and since the writing I had lost was still fresh on my mind, it didn’t take me all that long to recreate the content I had been working on.
Last week’s incident gave me enough of a scare to put some “just in case” measures in place. I hope you don’t need a scare like mine to do the same.
I mentioned my friend Nicole helping me last week…She had asked me to take a quick look at a short report she was working on called Avoiding Disaster in Your Online Business. Without reading it, I probably would have put off backing up my files and risked losing a good 2 years worth of work (YIKES). I now have system in place that allows me to automatically back up my files every night, both to a second hard drive and online.
Nicole’s report covers so much more than that and I’m setting aside some time this week to put some more security measures in place.
1) Passwords
I don’t know about you, but I am bad about using the same few passwords over and over again and making them easy to remember, which unfortunately also means they are easy to guess or crack. Nicole has some great suggestions for creating super secure passwords and a system for remembering them.
2) Server Security
Secure passwords are especially important when it comes to your website server. You don’t want someone hacking into your site and messing with it. Another good security measure is to keep your software for things like blogs, forums and membership sites and various other scripts up to date to avoid security holes that would give Hackers entry.
3) Server Backups
Backing up the stuff on your server is another big issue – Don’t just rely on your hosting company doing the backups for you. Have a contingency plan in place.
4) Business Manuals
Nicole also has some great suggestions for creating a business manual and what you should include in it. This manual will allow someone to step in and take over should you become incapacitated for some reason.
I also like it because it has all the stuff I can never remember and have to spent half an hour hunting down in it.
How To Avoid Disaster in Your Online Business is a quick read with some hands-on advice on things you want to get in place to keep your business secure. It’s a must read for any online business owner (unless you can afford to lose everything and start from scratch).
You may also like to read:
- Gaining Momentum With Your Online Business
- Online Article Writing Challenge – 100 Articles in 100 Days
- Increased Online Traffic in 30 Minutes Per Day
- Two Important Business Lessons I Learned Today
- This Is Why I’m In This Business …
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