Technology has made starting a small business or a home office easier than ever. There are literally hundreds of hardware and software pieces that take all of the guess work out of the equation. Bookkeeping software like QuickBooks let owners effectively mange their day-to-day business by tracking client data, invoicing, and ensuring the company’s financing. However, with technology being such an integral part of small businesses and home offices, the slightest technology disruption could be detrimental to the success of the business.

The problem lies with businesses simply taking for granted just how valuable their data is to the company and therefore not ensuring or protecting the life of that data. The fact of the matter is that technologies like hard drives don’t last forever. As they get bigger and faster, the lifespan of hard drives has significantly decreased. Hard drive replacement has become one of the most common warranty replaced parts on new computers today. Simply trusting data to last forever on hard drives just isn’t realistic.

If not already, the company should devise a redundancy policy. Simply put, how is the company’s data backed up and recovered if a catastrophe occurs. If nothing else, the business should save their data to more than one computer. Networking computers has never been easier especially since wireless technology cut the cables out of the picture. With a network, owners can just drag-and-drop data between machines with the idea that if one machine goes down, the other still works. While saving data on multiple machines is fast and should be done often, the company should still make regular hard backups of the data as well. Every few days to every week, the company should burn multiple copies of their data to CD/DVD with the idea being one copy is taken off-site in case a catastrophe takes over the entire business.

Following redundancy policies take a great deal of time especially when the data becomes almost too large to manage. For this there are several automated options businesses can take advantage of. One automated backup solution is a simple RAID setup. RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is simply two or more equally sized hard drives installed as an array to achieve better performance. There are many types of RAID configurations but one of the best for redundancy is RAID1 or Mirroring RAID. Data written to one drive is written to the second as well. So if one of the hard drives fail, the other one is an exact replica and takes over without missing a beat.

There are many automated software backup options as well. Software like Acronis True Image creates disk images of hard drives which can be stored on another hard drive or network computer. Being regular hard backups still need to be made even when using RAID, these software pieces automatically cut the disk image into pieces that fit on a series of CD/DVD’s. With the popularity of external hard drives, another option is simply to create multiple disk images and save them to external hard drives instead of optical media and store one off-site.

Frequency of backups always depend on time and money involved but typically one backup should be made every day and once a week for hard backups. Backups should be created with password protection or some sort of encryption in case the disks are lost or stolen. On at least a monthly basis, the redundancy policy should be tested to make sure the recovery process is adhered to.

As technology continues to simplify the growth of small businesses, it can also be used to ensure the life of the business. While redundancy policies do cost money to manage and maintain, the cost is minimal to the value of the data it protects.