There are three pieces of advice we give our clients with regard to insuring the data on their computer systems: 1) Back-Up; 2) Back-Up; and, 3) Back-Up!!

Computers and hard disks crash, files become corrupted, people accidentally delete or write over the top of existing files. It's inevitable. Like death and taxes, those precious data files of yours will be damaged in some way at some time. Maybe not today, or tomorrow or next week or next month, but some day they will go south — and not in a good way.

When you do a backup, do it intelligently. Don't become like one of our clients who called to say they accidentally deleted a number of data files, but hadn't made a backup for weeks. Or another client who had a power failure which resulted in key files being corrupted, then decided to backup these corrupted files onto the only backup tape they had before trying to fix them; thus overwriting their only good backup data set.

The question is, are you ready? Do you have an emergency recovery plan in place? Do you have housekeeping procedures in place which will ensure that your files are being backed-up regularly? Do you have a way to check for the integrity of the data in your files? If you've answered "NO" to any of these questions, you're in trouble.

We have prepared a preliminary Emergency Data Recovery Planning outline to assist you in preparing your business for systems loss survival which will be posted shortly.