Business Marketing Show

This week’s topic isn’t a glamorous one but that doesn’t make it any less important: Backups

One business Brendan worked with recently received this email from Crazydomains who’d just loss half of their staff email accounts. Listen to this episode and find out how to protect your business and avoid this scenario.

From Crazydomains to a Sydney business:

“It’s never easy to say sorry, or to break bad news, but it’s our policy to always be upfront and honest with you.
Due to an unforeseen incident in a storage upgrade the data from your hosting account has unfortunately been irretrievably lost.

As a valued customer of Crazy Domains, to try and go some way towards making up for your loss we applied $100 credit to your account. This can be used for any domains, product or service and does not expire.

It is not something we officially offer, but Crazy Domains does maintain backups in case of data loss and circumstances such as these. Although data backup remains the responsibility of the customer with hosting services, our engineers have been working tirelessly and around the clock with the storage vendors to try and recover this data. However, I am sorry to say that in this instance the relevant backups were also damaged, and I regret that our engineers have not been successful in their efforts to restore the lost data.

If you have kept back up files of your own, and you would like help from our customer care specialists with these, please reply directly to this email with your contact details and availability.

Your reply will be escalated automatically, and it will be given the highest attention possible.

With sincere apologies,”

Listen to this week’s show and learn:

• the tools the guys use themselves to protect their data
• common data storage points you need to protect in your business

In this episode:

Backup Toolset

• For backing up PCs and laptops – Ed uses Carbonite and Brendan uses Crashplan. Both are very popular and offer cloud backups and backups to an external hard drive
• For backup up Wordpress websites – Backup Buddy (which can be a bit hands on) and Vaultpress (which is automated and best for DIYers)
• For protecting files on your PC – Dropbox albeit not strictly a backup service. Dropbox also has an addon where they store all previously deleted files
• iCloud backup for iPhones and iPads…especially important if you take a lot of photos. Turning on the Dropbox photo sync for iDevices is also a good idea
• Email Backups – Brendan uses Backupify to backup his personal Gmail account (free) and company email accounts ($3/month/user) as well as client files stored on Google Apps/Google Drive
  If you’re using Google Apps or Gmail, using IMAP email vs POP3 means the server keeps the master copy of your mailbox. If something happens to a device your mailbox can be easily downloaded again from the server.
• Internet Backup – not mentioned on the show but a 3g dongle or knowing how to turn on 3g tethering on your smartphone which turns your phone into a wireless access point is a good idea if internet access is mission critical for your business.

Common threats you need to protect against:

• Flood or rain damage which is probably a lot more common than other physical threats like fire
• Theft which is probably a lot more common now with smartphones and tablets being more popular and more people using laptops
• Data corruption or hardware failure, its best to assume that your PC or mobile devices will completely fail at some point
• Accidental damage, how many people drop their phones these days?
• Accidental deletion and intentional deletion or malicious behaviour

3 important parts of backup

• setup
• ongoing monitoring and maintenance as well as weekly or fortnight checkpoints
• trial restores and general review of backup effectiveness quarterly

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (44.0MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | RSS