We see them everywhere. Public internet connections are even more common than Starbucks now. And they sure are handy, right? You can check your email, update your Facebook/Twitter, maybe do a little online banking to see how much you’ve spent at Starbucks this week.

However publicly available wifi is one case of where what you don’t know can hurt you. You see, anybody else who is connected to the same wireless network could potentially be eavesdropping on your activity. That means your emails and your email password, your Facebook password, and your online banking password could also be “public” for an enterprising cyber-criminal. Because of this I walways recommend that people do NOT use any publically available wifi internet for anything other than casual web surfing or services where you maybe don’t care if it gets compromised. The good news is that most banking website are immune to such eavesdropping (but not all!) and some email services are also becoming more secure.

It’s important to understand that I’m not talking about the wireless at your home, although odds are that isn’t secure either. I’m also not talking about the wireless internet that you get via your cell phone provider. A properly setup home wireless network can be very secure and cell phone-based wireless internet is automatically very secure. When I talk about “public wifi” I’m talking about the internet you get at a hotel, coffee shop, McDonald’s, or book store. Any place where other total strangers are using the same wireless connection is a place where you should avoid using email or websites that require your password.

What if one day all of your data was totally gone? Many places would simply go out of business. Backups are cheap insurance, but insurance won’t help you if you get the wrong policy!

What most people don’t realize, and too many computer technicians ignore, is that how you backup your data is a business decision and has very little to do with technology. The technology doesn’t factor in until the very end of the decision making process! There are five questions you must answer that will dictate how you backup, and you’ll notice that only the last question is a technology question.

Answer these questions:

1. What am I protecting my data from?
2. How long can I live with downtime while the data restores?
3. Do I have a reliable human to manage the backups, or should it be 100% automated?
4. How frequently do I need to backup and how far back in time do I need to go?
5. How much data do I have?

1. What are you protecting your data from when you back it up? Many people don’t have a good answer to that question because they’ve simply never thought about it. Yet this is the most important piece of the puzzle and the first question I ask my clients when discussing a backup plan. Think about this, if you want to protect your data from fire or flooding then it doesn’t do you any good for your backups to be just sitting right next to the server! Threats to your data come in five basic varieties: environmental factors (E.G. fire, water), physical theft of equipment, accidental or malicious deletion, viruses, and general system failure. Identify which of these general threats you want to protect yourself from.

2. How long can you survive without your data while restoring it? Another way to ask this is, if your main data server crashed and had to be completely restored from backup, how long would it take before you would start losing money? A few minutes, a few hours, a day, a few days? Different types of backup plans have different speeds of restoration. Know your tolerance for down time.

3. Do you have a reliable human to manage the backups? Many types of backups need to have a human available every day or week to swap tapes or external hard drives, and maybe take them off-site as well. This task often falls on a random office worker. Think about who this will be and if you REALLY trust them to do it reliably and properly. If not then you should take steps to make the process totally automated and free of the possibility of human error.

4. How frequently do you need to backup and how far back in time do you need to go? Another way to ask this is, if the server crashed then how much work would it be okay to lose? If your servers process customer orders then you might want up-to-the-minute backups to ensure you don’t lose a single transaction. However most small businesses only need nightly backups to remain current.

5. How much data do you have to backup? Is all you care about your QuickBooks data or do you have hundreds of gigabytes to save? Add it all up and don’t be stingy.

The answers to all of these questions (and maybe a few more) will dictate what type of backup system you should be running. We can help you sort it all out, just give us a call.