I am a Simply Accounting by Sage Certified Consultant and Development Partner. Besides providing Simply Training and Support to a wide range of clients, I develop reporting solutions utilizing Simply and the Microsoft Office© suite. I have been a user of Simply since its Bedford days in the ‘80s.
As well as being a partner in a bookkeeping practice, managing partner of a real estate investment group and providing controller services to a number of clients, I am also an active contributor to the Simply Forum.
I look forward to the opportunity to provide my thoughts on life and technology in the accounting community. If you have questions or ideas let’s hear about them and we’ll discuss them.
You cannot insure your data
Have you ever accidentally deleted a file or overwritten one in error. Have you ever lost a hard drive on a computer? Hopefully when this happens you can go to your backup media and retrieve the original.
Your data is one of your most important assets. Without your files, your business cannot run, period. Unfortunately, there is not an insurance company out there that can rebuild your files if they are destroyed.
I cannot say enough about backing up your critical files. Not doing so could cost you immensely and even ruin your business. Unlike a machine or a building, you cannot just go and get a new part or rebuild the damage. The Graziadio Business Review has a very well researched paper titled The Cost of Lost Data that discusses the risks and the real cost of losing your data.
Our office performs regular daily backups of all databases, spreadsheets and documents. These backups are made to external portable drives and subsequently removed from site on a regular basis. From time to time, these portable drives have been known to fail which gives one's heart reason to speed up and skip a beat or two. What if the other drives have failed? What if the server goes down today? Supposedly these kinds of double failures never happen but I have personally witnessed this many years ago - that should be rephrased as 'actually experienced it'. Happily, other backups meant that we only lost a few days work.
Ultimately, the best backup strategy should include offsite remote storage. There are many of these services available. Until recently I have always been concerned about the financial viability of such services as well as whether the backup servers are on Canadian soil. Not to say that any one of the providers out there are not excellent choices, I just needed to find one with which I could be comfortable.
Bell Canada (I have to declare that I own shares) is now offering a service called Data Protect that provides remote backup. Files are stored on Canadian soil, encrypted before they leave your premises and multiple versions can be kept to name a few of the options available. The whole process from setup to using has been painless.
Most important, I am fairly surely certain that we are 'insured' that the backups will be there for the day that they are needed in the future.
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