The single most valuable piece of business advice.

When I first started my own business I asked my late father, an IBM exec for 25 years, if he had any particular advice about information technology (IT) that he could pass on to me.

He told me that the single most valuable thing he’d learned in years of creating computerised systems for manufacturing and industry was simply the importance of backing up computer data every day.

Each new client would have to be shown the risks involved in not backing up regularly. The potential disaster in terms of loss of business data and sheer time trying to recover or restore data could be averted by simply carrying out the basic procedure of backing up.

External hard disks provide an easy and quick way to back-up data.

You may have already experienced the sinking feeling you get as you realise you’ve just lost that document you were working on because of the computer freezing.

Worse still you may have experienced your computer actually appearing to blow up during an electrical storm.

If you’ve backed up your data you’re in a position to get “back up” and running again without major stress and anxiety.

Nowadays all the major operating systems come with back-up software built in. Do you use yours?

Best practice

The best standard is to make three back-ups of your data.

One can be kept on-site, the other two ideally would be stored remotely in two different locations. This is in the event of some sort of major event like your office burning down or your being burgled.