CerTek knows a thing or two about hurricane season. Located in Dunedin, Florida, we’re lucky to have great beaches a stone’s throw away and warm weather year round. But we’ve also weathered our fair share of tropical storms and cyclones. And while preparing for any storm is hectic, knowing that your store’s data is safe and secure is a huge weight off your shoulders.
Troublesome Scenarios
If your business is at-risk during hurricane season (or in the path of a large storm), there’s a few scenarios that could happen that put your data at risk. Power outages, computers crashing, building damage, and flooding often happen in these scenarios. Just dealing with one of these situations is not only stressful, but could make your data hard to recover – or impossible.
Artisan lets you save your store’s data through a process called a data backup. Most of our clients have this scheduled on a regular basis, but a data backup can be done at any time by clicking on the “Backup” toolbar button.
Data Backup Options
When it comes to backing up your data, you have options. While it’s great to backup your data in the first place, it’s important to understand the limitations – and advantages – each method provides.
Flash Disk/USB Drive
Though handy, flash disks aren’t 100 percent reliable. The best way to safeguard your flash disk is to take it with you from the store every day, and not leave it in the store, where it’s suspectable to damage or theft. However, this is understandably easy to forget to do every day – and in the midst of preparing your storm for inclement weather.
Your Computer
Your main computer, such as your server, holds your Artisan data – but is most vulnerable to data loss if not backed up correctly. If your data is only backed up on this computer, and that computer is compromised, your data may be lost. The same goes for data backed up on a secondary computer. If that computer is damaged, your data can’t always be recovered.
Cloud-Based Backups
This next option is a cloud-based solution. That means you (and CerTek Support) can easily access your data from another computer. Since these options are cloud-based, your data should be safe from the disasters covered in this article, since it is stored apart from your main computer.
There are plenty of options to choose from (Google Drive, Carbonite, and Microsoft OneDrive, among others) – but we recommend DropBox.
We’ve found that Dropbox is the best solution for safeguarding your business’s data against disasters. Its key features are the ability to password protect files, easily access and restore data, and store up to 5 TB of data (depending on your plan).
Want to learn more about this option? Click here to learn how to upload your backups automatically, or do so manually. CerTek Support is happy to help you with this option as well.
We hope this helped provide some insight on the importance of backing up your data. Stay safe and dry this hurricane season!
