Spring Cleaning
Americans spend $39.5B on self-storage units, and there are roughly 1.9 billion rentable sq/ft of storage space in the US.
How many of those sq/ft are yours and what are the chances you do a little spring cleaning once a year?
What about at work? Do you clear off your desk each Friday? How about your computer desktop? Probably not as often, and it might be the most cluttered place of all.
In honor of world backup day (and storage-units-full-of-things we think we need to save for the future), this article is an undisguised reminder for you to take a moment to look at that stuff you’re paying real money to hang onto—both physical and digital.
Like your storage unit, you might just keep stroking that check each month for backup data storage, but not really knowing exactly what you’re paying to store. At least in the storage-unit scenario, you can poke around in person and know that what you see is physically there. With the data back-up, you could have a bunch of files with important names on them, but the documents inside are old and not accurate, potentially corrupted and unopenable, or non-existent altogether.
Very unlike your storage unit filled with extra lamps, unstylish coffee tables, and whatever else you feel like holding on to for a few decades, your data backup can literally be a carbon copy of your office files that can be stored without regard to physical space and put back together with a few keystrokes, if you’ve set it up correctly.
A couple of routine questions worth answering, if only once a year:
- What data are you backing up?
- Can you find critical information—such as Accounts Receivable data to substantiate those outstanding invoices—if you need to rely on the backup?
- How do you go about recovering that?
- How many minutes, hours, or days will it literally take before your organization can access that backup data, and is that fast enough?
- Have you ever seen that recovery in action, just to make sure it works?
If you need help with the storage unit, call a friend with a truck or use this guide to clean out your storage unit... However, if you need help with digital storage and backup for your company, we’re here and ready to help.
