BACKING up business data is an important daily protection - and even more critical towards the end of the financial year.

"It is worth thinking about all the important documents and emails and financial data you have collected over the year," says Scott Jones, of IT Leaders.

"Back-ups are the second most important thing you can do with your valuable data. The most important thing is creating it in the first place. Backing up is as essential as having the correct business insurance policies and should be viewed in this light.  If you never need to claim on your fire insurance, you won't be disappointed, but if you do, you'll think the insurance premium was a bargain."

Mr Jones says data backup should be considered as part of a disaster recovery plan for small and large-scale businesses.Key reasons to back up data

• A hard drive contains several thin, round steel or glass platters which spin at between 7200 and 15000 revolutions per minute.  These platters are densely packed with data - more than 3000 Microsoft Word documents can be stored on a magnetic patch smaller than half your fingernail.

• The data is read by a millimetre-long read head, which sits a fraction of a millimetre above the platter spinning at 7200rpm. Think about that next time you bang your laptop on a desk.

• The result is that hard drives are one of the most easily damaged and commonly faulty devices in a computer. That's a real bugger when all your data is stored on hard drives. Sooner or later you will have a drive failure somewhere in your business and sometimes a batch of drives die at the same point in their life due to a manufacturing fault.

• Data recovery is often possible on a failed drive, but it's expensive - usually around $1000, but sometimes more than $5000 if a full forensics lab is required.

• This direct expense often pales
against the cost of lost revenue while you wait for the data to be returned. Data recovery is time consuming. It can take days - and sometimes weeks - to get a desirable result. Steps to planning a back-up system

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The default location for Outlook to store emails and documents is on the hard drive of your computer in a place which is difficult to find - not in a shared centralised place like a server. Configure your programs properly to store data where the backup is set to search.

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