Reviewing events of 2005, if I were to choose the most important lesson for entrepreneurs, it clearly would be this: Back up your data.This year, hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated tens of thousands of small companies. Critical to their recovery was gaining access to their business records. Yet, roughly 60% of small businesses and nearly 70% of home-based computer users fail to back up their data regularly, according to research firm IDC.
Earlier this month, Dan Sherman explained how providing computer backup services could be a lucrative business opportunity, and described how to sell it door to door in upscale neighborhoods:
Take a cool looking hard drive with you when you go door to door. Use this one. It’s very cool looking and if you happen to get a Mac household, you’re a shoe in. Tell them you’ll set up the hard drive and ensure their data is being backed up every night at 2am (or whatever time they want) and they’ll never have to worry about it again. Their data will always be backed up.
The hard drive comes with backup software so you can just install it, tell it what to backup and you’re done. Tell them they can get it done now for $250 (which includes the hard drive and backup software and your services to set it up) or if they want to schedule another time, it’ll be $275.
Photo by Brian Steele.
Joseph on December 23rd, 2005 at 9:36 am
I know it’s a more publicized event of destruction on the Gulf this past year but i like to also remind those beyond a Hurricane’s reach that even more violent weather phenomena known as TORNADOES! can produce equal results.
November 6, and then again only 9 days later several huge F4 Tornadoes pulverized areas of Evansville Indiana and Madisonville Kentucky taking with them many innocent lives and grinding structures into nothing more than sticks & rubble. Winds exceeded 210MPH that surpassed even the destructive winds of the hurricane as bad as they were this season for the Gulf. Being in the Target area myself TWICE! and only a single county away from the worse devastation, reading the precautions above become all the more critical from here on out. Of course personal safety is alwways first & foremost but then the key to some businesses rebounding after surviving such catostrophic events is being able to retrieve pre-planned back-ups that were safely put away from potential risks.
Theres no time like the present to plan ahead while the chilly air is around, because with the onset of a new spring season comes also the Very Real threat of cloud demolition in the form of those dangerous weather conditions known as Tornadoes.
Dave Starr on December 23rd, 2005 at 10:59 am
This is a great post to make probloggers and prospective probloggers think about a good, low cost/no cost New Year’s resolution.
A blogging acquaintance has a very nice blog that’s been running several years and she’s taken smart steps to monetize it in the past year. She did an upgrade a week ago to her blogging software and pffft, the whole database was gone. After a lot of heartache she now has all but the past few months restored .. but those are important months and I wouldn’t want to think what this has done to her Adsense revenue this important month of December.
Free hint? The average blog is running on a PHP server and storing the posts in MYSQL. Read the docs for MYSQL and set up replication. Trade disk space with a fellow blogger, or rent a second, very cheap website just for the backups. You can easily do this for under a buck a month if you are a good shopper. How much are you earning per month and what would you do if your content suddenly went south?
Free hint 2: Using the backup service provided on your existing site are important, but having at least you posts saved on another machine geographically separated will offer much, much more protection.
Best regards
Dave
Richard Morrison Jr on December 23rd, 2005 at 12:24 pm
I have been reading this blog for quite a while and find it very interesting.
I am an entrepreneur; my company is Reliable Data Systems. We offer a product, labeled ReliableBackup, which allows small businesses an easy and reliable way to backup their data remotely. Once setup, our software fully automates the process and will perform backups on a nightly basis (or according to any other user-specified scheduled).
For more information, visit our website at http://www.reliabledatasystems.com.
You can also email me personally at rvmREMOVE@reliableTHEdataCAPSsystems.com
Rick
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