How to Choose the Right Backup for Your Data
Now that you know how you're going to collect your company's data to do the much-acclaimed Business Intelligence (if you don't know what that is, click here! If you know what it is but don't know how to use it, click here!), it's time to think about how to store it somewhere safe!
If you chose to do it the old school way, timing service with a stopwatch and jotting it down in an Excel spreadsheet, getting organized in the cloud is easy. Now, if instead of old school you go the prehistoric route, writing it on a sheet of paper, STOP RIGHT NOW! There's no reason to put yourself through that, my friend.
Today's technologies make all this collecting, organizing, and backing up of the information you so diligently gathered and analyzed much easier. By technology, I mean websites and apps that can collect, store, and maintain this information – not a spy drone hovering over your operation.
There are three ways to back up your data, so grab your coffee, buckle up, and switch to airplane mode, because this topic matters. Let's go!
Backing up your business data on Drives
Let's start by explaining what drives are. Simply put, a drive is any piece of equipment that can be attached to your computer, whether a keyboard, a mouse, or even the famous webcam.
But, for the topic at hand, the only ones you should consider are the well-known USBs and External Hard Drives. Before you start, you'll need to know two things, one for each type of drive.
The USB, because of its size, doesn't have much room for large backups, which means you'd need quite a lot of them if you want to store all of your computer's data. Not to mention that, also because of their size, they're very easy to lose, so try to set aside a dedicated spot for them – and use labels to know which USB holds which folder or file, so you can spend your time on Netflix instead of hunting for the right USB.
With the External Hard Drive it's a different story: there's enough room to store every video, photo, and meme you've ever received on WhatsApp, and much more! This kind of space used to be far more expensive, but today you'll find cheap options that fit anyone's pocket (literally, both in size and in price!).
The problem with this kind of drive is how fragile it is. If you drop it, the internal damage will very likely make it impossible to recover your files. I've been through this myself, when someone cleverly decided to mail the drive to me. I never saw the work I did back in my agency days again — let alone my high school photos.
These days, I keep my drive in the same drawer, in the same room, locked away like treasure. After what happened, I barely use it for fear of going through the same thing again!
If I had gone with a Solid State Drive (SSD), the hard drive's “tougher cousin”, this probably wouldn't have happened. That's because SSDs, at the end of the day, were created precisely because of that physical fragility. But, just like external hard drives, there's no way to access them if you don't have the device in hand!
Backing up your business data on websites (the famous Cloud)
This one, without a doubt, is the easiest to do — and also the messiest. Sites like Google Drive can collect and store whatever documents you tell them to, but they're not 100% intuitive either.
There are plenty of cases where the user, after uploading the documents to the cloud, deleted them from the computer. Because of that site's automatic sync (which can also be turned off), the document was deleted in the cloud too, and ended up lost in the depths of the CPU.
This happens because services like Google Drive, iCloud or Dropbox – among many others – were built with a specific goal in mind. For Google's corporate option, Google Cloud Platform, the goal was total dominance, and it's far more useful for the tools it offers to customize the cloud. Those tools, however, were meant for digital companies whose businesses and apps need to move and store huge amounts of information, in many different ways and in many places around the world for faster access.
Services like Dropbox, on the other hand, are mostly used by people online to keep photos, documents and all sorts of files, letting you not only store them but also share them with anyone who has the link to your drive. In the end, the comparison is simple: Dropbox was made for storing and sharing information, usually by individuals; Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services were designed with companies in mind, offering a range of apps and extensions aimed at organizing large volumes of data.
The problem with Dropbox, iCloud and Google Drive is that, no matter which one you pick, the documents will just sit there, one by one, with no organization beyond whatever you set up yourself – whether in folders, names or dates. For Business Intelligence, that turns into something harder and more time-consuming to update and track, because the numbers that would generate the reports should be stored together.
That said, if you go to the trouble of setting the backup up properly on Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform, using the pivot tables they offer, it can end up being a smart solution. The problem is the upfront work involved, because if something isn't configured correctly, chances are not all the information will show up in the reports. Worse still, that data may end up being cross-referenced the wrong way, giving you false results about your operation.
The reason is simple: more numbers and data = better reports and deeper analysis.
If you go with the simpler, more intuitive sites like Google Drive, iCloud and Dropbox, you'll have to hunt down the right files, enter the new data (every time you collect it) into your spreadsheet correctly, always minding the date and the type of data you're entering, and only then analyze it. If I almost fell asleep writing that, imagine having to actually do it.
Backing up your business data with apps
Now for the most interesting part! There are plenty of apps you can look up online that will help you store your business information.
There are apps like Backblaze that, for a small fee – and an internet connection – can scan your hard drive and keep everything in their data centers. Whenever you want to access your files, all you need is an active connection.
Windows and Mac themselves come with apps already installed that can handle this process automatically. On the Mac, Time Capsule is the way to go — you just set how often the backup should run and the computer takes care of the rest on its own. On Windows, it's the same story! The options for both platforms can easily be found in the settings panel.
Not to mention that the reminders about needing to back up your computer are almost as frequent as the tips from the late Clippy in Word.
Conclusion
Either way, the biggest challenge you'll run into with data backup is keeping that data updated and processing it for analysis. When you scatter the puzzle pieces, it gets harder to see the picture.
Now, when data collection, turning it into reports and the backup itself are all handled by the same system, you end up with a smart, integrated solution for your company's organization, well-being and strategic planning.
It's hard to focus on analysis while you're busy collecting data, and that data, when collected by hand, may not be as faithful to reality as we tend to think. Human error is the main culprit behind all sorts of analytical and process failures, in countless markets. From miscalculations in space travel to flaws in city planning – does anyone actually understand Morumbi? –, it all comes down to human error.
In short, the more “grunt work” – from collecting to organizing the information – you can hand off to computers, the better. These little things usually end up draining your energy day after day, so the last thing you want to do at the end of a shift is back up – or analyze – the data you spent all day collecting
In other words, what really matters is getting the setup right the first time, so your database grows in a structured way, right alongside your business! The other option is to use an integrated automation system that collects the data automatically, generates reports and backs everything up, in case something happens.
