FIVE REASONS WHY YOU NEED TO BACKUP YOUR DATA

There are all sorts of backups that help you get out of various situations. Think of the spare tyre in your boot, or the power bank in your bag for your phone.

There are various reasons for having backups. In some situations, it can save your life, but with data, a backup can save your business.

We’ve recently had a few calls from various clients indicating that they have forgotten to submit their Full Payment Submission (FPS) and have ran the payroll update. They have contacted HMRC & all they’ve had back from them is “you can only submit the FPS electronically”.

Their only option is for us to restore a copy of their data from our end, recreate the FPS file and send it back to them, so they can submit it via their Online Filing Manager.

So, here are a few things to consider:

  • We cannot stress enough how important it is for this backup to exist. Without it, you don’t really have any options.
  • When do you take your backup? We would suggest taking it before you run the FPS, or certainly before you run the update.
  • You cannot have too many backups when it comes to payroll. These are compressed files that are stored in a folder on your server.
  • Only take the backup for the company you’re running payroll for.

So, considering this, let’s take a look at the top five reasons why you need to backup your data:

Simple recovery

People are not infallible. They make mistakes, and they make them quite often. Emails containing viruses are accidentally opened each day and important files are often mistakenly deleted.

There’s no reason to fear these issues if you take frequent additional snapshots of your systems. You can simply restore to a snapshot taken before the virus happened. Or you can recover the file from a time before it was deleted. It’s easy to protect from the little things and there’s the added benefit of being ready for big things as well.

Audits, taxes and archives

Many, if not most businesses, are required to keep business records for an extended period. This is either for tax purposes or because of various regulations. You might just need to look at what was going on a few years ago.

It’s easy to assume that your computers have you covered just because they’ve got your last few years’ worth of information on them. But as you might know by now, having one copy is generally a huge mistake. Ensuring you’ve got an offsite backup of critical client information can really save you if something goes wrong locally.

Competitive advantage

In the untimely event of a disaster, the first business to get back up and running will take all the business of those that aren’t back on their feet. As we’ll discuss in a moment, not having a plan can mean your doors are closed for good.

Proper planning means that your doors stay open to those that worked with businesses that couldn’t survive during a disaster.

Deadly downtime

43% of businesses that suffer major data loss never reopen. Many of these companies end up closing their doors for good within two years of a major data loss. Even large data loss scenarios aren’t always the result of a disaster.

Human hands are very capable of destroying a business through silly mistakes or oversights. Don’t think Mother Nature is always responsible. Simply backing up data and having an effective backup recovery plan in place can help mitigate these types of threats. You can be on of the surviving businesses if you think ahead.

Doing work twice

The first rule of doing work is “do it right the first time”. If you suffer a minor failure and don’t have backups, you may be able to recover certain things, but you never know what those “certain things” will be. In almost any case, you’ll have a boat-load of work to redo whether it’s setting up your systems all over again, or recreating spreadsheets you or your employees have been working on for months.

If you’re unsure on any of the above, please do not hesitate to get in contact with one of our Business Software Consultants by either calling 0191 500 8150 or email info@monpellier.co.uk.

Comments are closed.