The importance of backups cannot be underestimated. I am still amazed reading stories in the news about companies loosing their data and even whole websites. There are many reasons your important data can get lost. Some of the reasons are hard-drive failures, computer viruses, accidental deletions, fire, flood, theft.

There is also the trend to have applications and data hosted in the cloud.
This has many advantages over local applications and storage, but the questions remains, how safe is your data in the cloud?
I many cases it will be safer than in our home or business. While big providers like Microsoft Google and Amazon are quite safe, but what about the smaller lesser known companies?

You should be aware of the pitfalls with cloud providers.

• Smaller cloud providers may not have the same type of data centers. In fact customers usually don’t know how and where their data is hosted.
• You may have billing disputes with your provider and your data could be blocked until your pay the bills, even if they are in the wrong.
• You should backup your data regardless where it is located.
• You may have to ask your hosting provider how to back up your web-page or your CRM provider to extract your database. If they are unwilling to let you to back up your data, look elsewhere.
• Don’t fall for the sales-pitch that your data is safe with them. You may find out when it is too late.

The importance in this message is to have more than one local copy of your data.
I would recommend to have at least 3 complete copies.
Two copies on two different computer devices and a third one stored off site.
The devices can be a PC, server, NAS, or external hard-drive.
You also should use some software to automate your backups. There are plenty cheap and even free backup software packages available.