Editor’s Note: At Backblaze, the entrepreneurial spirit is in our DNA: Our founders started out in a cramped Palo Alto apartment, worked two years without pay, and bootstrapped their way to the stable, thriving startup we are today. We’ve even written a series about some of the lessons we learned along the way.
But Backblaze is a sample size of one, so we periodically reach out to other experts to expand our startup test cases and offer more insights for you. In that regard, we’re happy to invite Lars Lofgren to the blog.
As the CEO of Quick Sprout—a business focused on helping founders launch and optimize their businesses—Lars is a wellspring of case studies on how businesses both do and do not succeed. We asked Lars for advice on one subject near and dear to our hearts: Business Backup. He’s boiled down his learnings into a quick guide for backing up your business today. We hope you find Lars’ guidance and stories useful—if you have any tips or experience with business backup please share them in the comments below.
How to Make Your Business Unbreakable
by Lars Lofgren, CEO, Quick Sprout
Launching a new business is thrilling. As someone who has been in on the ground floor of several startups, there’s nothing else like it: You’re eager to get started and growth seemingly can’t come soon enough.
But in the midst of all of this excitement, there’s a to-do list that’s one-thousand tasks deep. You’ve already gone through the tedious process of registering your business, applying for an EIN, opening new bank accounts, and launching your website. So many entrepreneurs want to dive right into generating revenue, but there’s still a ton to do.
Backing anything up is usually the last thing anyone wants to think about. But backups need to be a priority for every new business owner, because losing precious data or records could be beyond detrimental to your success. A computer accident, office fire, flood, ransomware attack, or some other unforeseen calamity could set you back months, years, or in many cases, end your business entirely. Earlier this week, I watched a fire in my neighborhood completely engulf a building. Three businesses went up in smoke and the fire department declared a total loss for all three. I hope they had backups.
Spending a little time on backups in the early stages of your launch won’t just save your company from disaster, it will make your business unbreakable.
Even if your company has been in business for a while, there’s still time for you to implement a data backup plan before it’s too late. And knowing what to back up will save you time, money, and countless headaches. Here are six simple steps to guide you:
Backing Up Hard Drives
Hard drives are like lightbulbs. It’s not a matter of if they will go out, it’s a matter of when.
As more time passes, there becomes a greater chance that your hard drives will fail. For those of you who are interested in learning more about hard drive failures, Andy Klein, Backblaze’s Director of Compliance, recently published the most recent hard drive statistics here.
Take a moment to think about all of the crucial information that’s been compiled on your hard drive over the last few months. Now, imagine that information getting wiped clean. One morning you wake up and it’s just gone without a trace. In the blink of an eye, you’re starting from nothing. It’s a scary thought and I’ve seen it happen to too many people. Losing files at the wrong moment could cause you to miss out on a critical deal or delay major projects indefinitely. Timing is everything.
So when it comes to your hard drives, you need to set up some type of daily backups as soon as possible. Whatever backup tool you decide to go with, just make sure you’re fully covered and prepared for the worst. The goal is to be able to fully recover a hard drive at a moment’s notice.
Once you’ve covered that first step, consider adding a cloud backup solution. Cloud storage is much more reliable than a series of physical backup drives.
Backing Up Email
I would be lost without email.
For me, this might actually be the most important part of my business to back up. My email includes all of my contacts, my entire work history, and the logins for all of my accounts. Everything I do on a day-to-day basis stems from my email. You might not rely on it as heavily as I do, but I’m sure that email still plays a crucial role in your business.
Today, most of us are already using cloud services, like G Suite, so we rarely think about backing up our email. And it’s true that your email won’t be lost if your computer gets damaged or your hard drive fails. But if you lost access to your login or your email account was corrupted, it would be devastating.
And it does happen. I’ve come across a few folks who were locked out of their email accounts by Google with no explanation. I’m sure there are bad actors out there abusing Google’s tools, but it’s also very possible for accounts to be accidentally shut down, too.
Even normal business operations result in lost email and documents. If your business has employees, put this at the top of your priority list. Any turnover usually results in losing that employee’s email history. For the most part, their emails will be deleted when the user is removed from your system, but there’s a good chance that you’re going to need access to those emails. Just because that employee is gone, it doesn’t mean that their responsibilities disappear.
While it’s possible to export your G Suite data, you’d then be on the hook for doing this regularly and storing your exports securely. In my opinion, this requires too much manual work and leaves room for error.
I’d recommend going through the G Suite Marketplace to find an app that can handle all of your backups automatically in the cloud. (Editor’s note: For the easiest, most reliable solution, we recommend Google Vault.) Once you set this up, you’ll never have to worry about your G Suite data again. Even if it somehow gets corrupted, you’ll always be able to restore it quickly.
What about Office 365 and Outlook? It’s easy to backup Outlook manually by exporting your entire inbox. There are also ways to back up your company’s email with Exchange Online. The best method will depend on your exact implementation of Outlook at your company.
For those of you managing email on your own network who don’t plan to move to a cloud-based email service, just ensure your existing backups cover your email or find a way to ensure they do as soon as possible.
Backing Up Your Website
If your website goes down, or, even worse, you become a victim of malware, you’ll lose the lifeblood of your business: new customers.
People hack websites all the time in order to spread viruses and malware. Small businesses and startups are an easy target for cybercriminals because their sites often aren’t protected as well as those of larger companies. If something horrible like this happens, you’ll need to reset your entire site to protect your business, customers, and website visitors.
This process is a whole lot easier when you have website backups. So, when you create your website, make daily backups a priority from the outset. Start with your web host. Contact them to see what kind of backups they offer. Their answer could ultimately sway you to use one web host over another. For those of you who are using WordPress, there are lots of different plugins that offer regular backups. I’ve reviewed the best options and covered this topic more extensively here.
Generally speaking, website backups will not be free. But paying for a high-quality backup solution is well worth the cost, and far less expensive than the price of recovering from a total loss without backups.
This will also protect you and your employees from the fallout of launching a bug that accidentally brings the whole website down. Unfortunately, this happens more often than any of us would like to admit. Backups make this an embarrassing error, rather than a fatal one.
Backing Up Paperwork
Being 100% paper-free isn’t always an option. Even though the vast majority of documentation has transitioned to digital, there are still some forms that stubbornly remain in paper. No matter how hard I try, I still get stuck with paper documents for physical receipts, some tax filings, and some government paperwork.
When you launch your business, you will generate a batch of paper records that will slowly grow over time. Keeping these papers neatly organized in a filing cabinet is important, but this only helps with storage. Paper documents are still vulnerable to theft, flooding, fire, and other physical damage. So why not just digitize them quickly and be done with it? Not only will this free up extra space around the office, but it will also give you peace of mind about losing your files in a catastrophe.
The easiest way to back up your paperwork is to get a scanner, scan your documents, and then upload them to the cloud with the rest of your files. You can forget about them until they’re necessary.
It’s in your best interest to do this with your existing paper files immediately. Then make it part of your process whenever you get physical paperwork. If you wait too long, not only are you susceptible to losing important files, but the task will only grow more tedious and time-consuming.
Backing Up Processes
Not many companies think about it, but not backing up processes has easily caused me the most grief out of any other item in this post. In a perfect world, all of your staff will give you plenty of notice before they leave. This will give you time to fill the position and have that employee train the next person in their remaining weeks. But you and I both know that the world isn’t perfect.
Things happen. Employees leave on the spot or do something egregious that results in an immediate firing. Not everyone leaving your business will end on good terms, so you can’t bank on them being helpful during a transitional period. And when people leave your company, their knowledge is lost forever.
If those processes aren’t written down, training someone else can be extremely difficult, and nearly impossible if a top-tier employee leaves. The only way to prevent this is by turning all processes into standard operating procedures, better known as SOPs. Then you just need to store these SOPs somewhere that is also backed up, whether that is your hard drive (as mentioned above) or in a project management tool like Confluence, Notion, or even a folder in your Google Drive. As long as you have your SOPs saved on some sort of cloud backup solution, they’ll always be there when you need to access them.
Backing Up Software Databases
If you run a software business or use software for any internal tools, you need to get backups set up for all of your databases. Similar to your hard drives, sooner or later one of them will go down.
When I was at KISSmetrics, we had an engineer shut down our core database for the entire product by accident. When someone makes a mistake like that they don’t always act rationally. Instead of notifying management immediately, this engineer walked away and went to bed. The database was down overnight until the following morning. While we had some backups, we still lost about twelve hours worth of customer data. Without those backups, it would have been even worse.
The more critical the database, the more robust the backup solution needs to be. As I said before, you need to plan for the worst. Sometimes a daily backup might not be good enough if the database is super critical. If you can’t afford to lose 24 hours worth of information, then you’ll need a solution that backs up at the frequency your business requires.
Work with your engineering team to make sure all core functionality is completely redundant. Customers can tolerate their login page being down for a short period, but they won’t tolerate permanent data loss.
Final Thoughts on Business Backup
I know, your list of things to do when you start a new business just got longer! But backing up your data, files, and other important information is crucial for every business across all industries. You can’t operate under the assumption that you’re immune from these pitfalls. Sooner or later, they happen to all of us. Whether it be physical damage to a hard drive, theft to a computer, human error, or a malicious attack against your website, you must limit your exposure.
But good news: Once your backups are in place, your business will be unbreakable.
Editor’s Note: If you’ve read this far, you’re likely very serious about backing up your business—or maybe you’re just passionate about the process? Either way, Lars has outlined a lot of the “whys” and plenty of good “hows” for you here, but we’d love to help you tick a few things off of your list. Here are a few notes for how you can implement Lars’ advice using Backblaze:
Backing up your…
…Hard Drives:
This is an easy one: backup is the core of what we do, and backing up your computers, and your hard drives are the easiest first step you’ll take. And now, if you opt for Forever Version History, you only need to hook up your older drives once.
…Email… and Paperwork, Process, and Database:
If your email is already with a cloud service, you’ve got one backup, but if you are using Outlook, Apple Mail, or other applications storing email locally on your computer, Backblaze will automatically back those up.
…Website:
As Lars mentioned, a lot of hosting services offer backup options. But especially if you’re looking for WordPress backups, we have you covered.
Another option to consider is using Cloudflare or other caching services to prevent “soft downtime.” If you’ve engaged with Backblaze, we have a partnership with Cloudflare to make this solution easier.
Now that you’re all backed up and have some extra time and peace of mind, we’d love to hear more about your business: How does your infrastructure help you succeed?
