What Disaster Recovery Plan?


Office Depot's Guide to Disaster Recovery PlansDo you have a disaster recovery plan for your business?

Uh huh. You’re probably just like 71% of small business owners — you don’t have one.

It might seem intimidating to put one together. I remember working on the mother of all disaster recovery plans in my corporate days. It felt like we were writing the sequel to War and Peace. But a disaster recovery plan doesn’t have to be that involved.

Office Depot has a guide for preparing a disaster recovery plan for smaller enterprises. It seems practical — not too complicated. The guide covers points such as keeping lists of vendors, having a supply of forms you use in your business available off-site, and backing up data.

As you are putting together a disaster recovery plan, keep in mind one of today’s important trends: online backup services. They back up your data continuously AND they store a copy of your computer files offsite. That way, if there is a fire or flood, you can recover your files almost instantly. And they are cost effective. Prices start at around $50 a year. I’ve heard good recommendations about Carbonite and Mozy, two such services.

Read the Office Depot guide to get started on your disaster recovery plan:
Expecting the Unexpected — Disaster Preparedness Strategies for Small Business.

4 Comments ▼

Anita Campbell Anita Campbell is the Founder, CEO and Publisher of Small Business Trends and has been following trends in small businesses since 2003. She is the owner of BizSugar, a social media site for small businesses.

4 Reactions
  1. Online backup services are great for some off-line data, but also consider the benefits of having entire sets of your data stored on the web — full time. When you use online contact management applications, invoicing applications and others, you get this for free. It’s an often overlooked benefit to using online applications. Full disclosure: we provide an online invoicing and payment application, which obviously includes data backups and highly secured access to your data.

    SimplifyThis.com

  2. Anita Campbell

    Hi Sanjay, yes you bring up a good point.

    One of my contractors had a computer crash recently. Luckily she used Yahoo for her email. She was able to reconstitute not only her important correspondence, but also almost 75% of her spreadsheets and Word documents, most of which had been sent or received as attachments via email.

    Anita

  3. Even though many organizations are using the “Online Management Application”, the problem with these type of applications is that organizations are “literally” putting their critical information in the hands of to many “Unknown” people. No only those servers who provide these types of service but also the risks involve with possible data thef from hackers and cyber criminals stealing the information from computer systems and from the airways of VPN and WLAN.