Advice for Dye Sublimation Business Owners: Back it up!

If you were to have a terrible fire today, where would that leave you? You probably have General Liability insurance to cover equipment and Heaven forbid, injuries. But what about the “real” business – all those job files stored on computers around your shop? Insurance will replace the machines, but they can’t replace the files. What would you do? 

This fear and the reality behind it, can all be put to rest by a simple exercise: Back up your computers. It’s easy in today’s world. There’s no more carrying tapes or disks home every night, or having to spend a ton of time transferring files every couple of days. And you have choices: A system that is growing in popularity is an Internet linked “Personal Cloud” system where you buy a hard drive, connect it to your home Internet (or anywhere else) system and it automatically backs up your business computers every night while you sleep. These are not expensive and offer a variety of memory options up to at least 4TB for as little as a couple of hundred dollars.

The Word program I am typing on right now isn’t even on my computer – only a shell. The actual program is on the Cloud. This is both good and bad, but one advantage is I can access it from any computer anywhere in the world as long as I have access to an Internet connection. My Cloud back up kicks in about 3AM every night and updates whatever files I tell it to backup (the setup is one time only but can be updated at any time). Gaining access to the cloud is a fairly easy process and can be accomplished through a few popular programs including https://aws.amazon.com/.

Usually, the first 5 or 10 GB of storage is free with a small fee for heavier use. I personally use Norton Security which is simple, inexpensive and automatic. Because Norton is constantly monitoring my computers with its antivirus software, it seems very logical. So far, I have never had to access those files and hopefully, I never will. A few years ago (BC – before cloud) I had a hard drive crash that held thousands of customer jobs. Although I had them backed up on Zip disks in a rather helter-skelter way, and I sent the drive off to have the data recovered (expensive).

Unfortunately we still lost hundreds of important files, including ALL of my accounting files for most of a year. That was nothing short of stupid on my part, but it was an incredible learning experience!  The point of all this is: Back up your computers. Just do it!