Working to make IT work for you and your business.
Should disaster strike: your computer system is stolen, damaged by fire, rendered inopperable by a virus infection or whatever, your insurance policy will cover replacement hardware or possibly software. It may even by covered by warranty against mechanical failure.
Just think of the hours of work spent keeping those accounts up to date - or the effect on your business should you lose details of all your clients or prospective customers.
Whilst it possible to ensure against the costs of inputting all that data again; this could takes days or weeks and assumes that you have the original documents to hand. Also your insurers may not pay out if they feel that you have been negligent in not taking reasonable pre-cautions such as regular backups.
Thankfully it is not often that systems fail, but when they do the effect on your business can be little short of disaster. Just as we readily insure our plant and other items essential to our businesses, we should spend a little time taking the precautions mentioned below.
That your data is backed up regularly
You protect against External Threats.
You have a disaster recovery plan in place
The wisest precaution is to make regular backups. A backup is a separate copy of all your data files (or even the whole system) on some media that you can take away and store in a safe place; alternatively you can backup over the internet.
The various ways of making a backup
Whatever system you use:
Should some major system crash occur, the system won't start properly, or something doesn't work at it used to; Windows© XP provides a number of way's of recovering your system or restoring it to an earlier state. You will need to prepare a special backup and an ASR floppy disk to recover from the worst disasters.
Earlier versions of Windows provide for Emergency Repair Discs or Start Up discs. Click here for more information on these and other options
As well as things going wrong on their own accord user also have to be aware of and take precautions against external - the 'dark forces' inhabiting parts of cyberspace. There is a need to be not merely 'streetwise' but 'Information Superhighway Wise' as well.
These take several forms:
For more information see:
Very occasionally, after a serious infection, it becomes necessary to rebuild the entire system from scratch, it is sometimes easier and cheaper to do this than to try to 'heal' an infection. To permit this to happen smoothly, use the following insurance* policy. This is also useful in the event of other disasters such as theft, disc crashes and fire.
* Whilst it is possible to take out insurance against computer failure and the cost of re-inputting data etc. Insurers may not pay out where they deem the policy holder to have been negligent.
** Frequently cheaper PCs purchased from high street stores, or unbranded clones do not come with re-installation discs. This may prove to be a 'false economy'. If purchasing online; tick the appropriate box.