Do You Back Up Regularly?

Okay now be honest. Do you have copies of all your work – and do you update them regularly? What would happen now if you suddenly lost all your work, your computer crashed irretrievably or your laptop was stolen?If you have a website or do most of your work on computer then you owe it to yourself to keep back ups of all the data you have. Even though your hosting provider may be completely secure and your website is in no danger at all of crashing or being lost, we all know that things do happen and if you don’t have back ups of anything then you run the risk of losing everything – and by that I mean your whole business.And it’s not just a question of security either. It’s practical to keep a back up of everything because you never know when you may need it. Let’s suppose you have ten categories of goods on your website, and each category has twenty products in it. If you needed that information for web marketing to enable you to put your products on eBay as well as on your own site, it’s a lot easier to have a word document to work from that you can edit and tweak as you need to, than to copy the content from your website and use that. No matter what your website design is like, you’ll find this a tricky and frustrating option to go for – and all for saving some space on your hard drive.The best bet is to keep more than one copy and keep them in separate places. If you have a safe, make a copy of everything and put it in there. It might sound like overkill but if you ever need it you will be glad it’s there.It’s quite alarming how many people and businesses there are out there today, online and offline, who don’t take adequate security measures with their data. Protection is vital in any type of business and internet marketing is no different. Even if the data you are backing up has no real value in any way – that is, no one could get any profit out of it if they got hold of it themselves – that doesn’t mean it has no value and it wouldn’t cost you if you lost it.Unfortunately, some people think of backing up only the things that have a definite monetary value completely missing the point that, if they had to re-type all their product descriptions, this would cost them a lot of time and effort. And of course, if their website was offline in the meantime, they would end up losing money anyway. Sometimes not everything is black and white.So why not take some time out now to make sure you won’t fall victim to data loss if anything happened to your work. If something happens tomorrow, you’ll be glad you acted today.