3 Great Data Backup Plans for an Office

If your company has any important files on any of the computers in the office, you should have a data backup plan.

But many businesses, despite the risk of data loss, don't even think about data backup until it's too late--hard drives fail and crucial information is lost. Data recovery companies can get it back, in many cases, but the costs can be thousands of dollars depending on the company and the issues the cause the drive to fail.

Here are three ways that your office can set up a backup plan that will keep your company's data secure and safe.

1. Tape backup - Data tapes are used almost exclusively for backup, because they're built for it; you wouldn't want to store an operating system on one, as anyone who used an old tape-driven computer can attest, but for nightly or weekly backups they can be very handy. The disadvantages are that you'll need a separate tape drive, backup software, and people experienced enough to know how to pull data off the tapes in case something should go wrong. They're also not a form of constant backup, and have to be switched out, but they're great for cataloging old information in case you need to go back to a particular backup (rather than just the last backup created).

2. External hard drives - If your office only has a few important files, or if your office is fairly small and can't afford a more expensive backup system, you might want to consider buying one or several external hard drives for data backup.

Backing up to an external hard drive is as simple as copying and pasting information, and many of the drives available commercially come with data backup software that can be set up to regularly backup files at a set time.

The important thing to remember is that external hard drives are just basic hard drives in a nice case; they're as prone to failure as any drive you buy off of the shelf. If you're keeping data on multiple sources (i.e. your internal drive and your external drive), this isn't really a problem, but if one of the sources fails it's important to replace it as soon as possible in order to avoid data loss.