In a Perfect World You Wouldn’t Need To Read This
Not-For-Proft Advisor, 2005 Spring Issue

We all know that when it comes to technology, what can go wrong eventually will. Data loss disasters, due to improper or failed backup procedures, can happen anytime. Most occurrences of data loss happen during the regular course of business, which today includes high tech challenges such as viruses and hackers. These have become part of our normal business operations along with unusual catastrophic disasters, which can add an additional level of complexity and risk.

There are many horror stories about people losing their disk drives to failure, having their computers stolen, and viruses or hackers wiping out information. Many people shrugged them off. Guess what? They’re all true.
There are many different solutions for backing up your critical data. No one solution is right for every situation. For most small and medium organizations, tape backup is a cost-effective solution for servers. For PCs, burning a CD or backing up to Zip drives is inexpensive, but beware of reliability issues. Critical business data should not be stored on PCs. Rather, organizations should default all data storage to a central storage device such as a server or mass storage device.

Nonprofit organizations should ensure all critical data is included in the backup process. This includes:
• Business e-mails
• Financial, budget, and payroll information
• Business contacts
• Project plans and documentation
• Required business data, such as grant reporting information
• Data files from all application systems
• File shares for all staff

The backup process requires daily monitoring and at least monthly testing. A good backup scheme consists of:
• Organizing your data files
• Purchasing and installing reliable backup software
• Setting up a convenient backup scheme
• Backing up your data daily
• Verifying backups daily
• Ensure that some of your backups are kept off-site
• Testing the backup on a regular basis Sounds simple, but it’s not easy.

Being diligent in daily review and testing the backups periodically are key to avoiding a costly data loss incident. Learn from the lessons of others and get “back up.”