Avoid Losing Your Restaurant Computer Data When Disaster Strikes

Imagine wasting tons of hours of work – or imagine losing your restaurant menu database, employee records, financial records, or all of the files your restaurant has ever produced or compiled.

What if a major storm, flood, or fire destroyed your office and all of your files? Or if a virus messed up your server… do you have an emergency recovery plan in place that you feel confident in? How quickly do you think you could recover, if ever?

Many restaurant owners tend to ignore or forget about taking steps to secure their company’s network from these types of catastrophes until disaster strikes. By then it’s too late and the damage is already severe.

After working with lots of restaurants in the Mid-Atlantic area, we've observed that six out of ten businesses will experience some type of major network or technology disaster that can cost them between $2,000 to $20,000 in repairs and restoration costs on average. That doesn’t even include lost productivity, sales, and lost customers due to their down POS systems or network.

I find most restaurant owners don’t think about the importance of regular preventive maintenance and disaster recovery planning because they are already swamped with more immediate daily fires demanding their attention. If the POS system and network is in good condition today, it goes to the bottom of the pile of things to worry about. In most cases, no one is watching to make sure the back ups are working, the virus protection is up-to-date, or that the network is in good shape.

The 4 Most Important Things You Should Do To Be Sure Your Company Is Safe From All Types Of Disasters:

While it is impossible to plan for every potential computer disaster or emergency, there are some easy and inexpensive measures you can put into place that will help you avoid the vast majority of computer disasters you could experience.

Step#1: Make Sure You Have a Back Up of Your System

It just amazes me how many businesses never back up their computer network. Think about this: you write the most important piece of information you could ever write on a chalk board and I come along and erase it. How are you going to get it back? No way! Unless you have memorized it, or if YOU WROTE A COPY OF IT, you can’t recover the data. It’s long gone. That is why it is very important to back up your network. There are a number of things that can cause you to lose data files. If the data you keep within your computer is very important for your business, it's much better to store more than just one copy of it.

Step #2: Perform A Complete Data Restore To Make Sure Your Backups Works Fine

This is another big mistake I see. Many restaurant owners sets up a backup system, but they never care to check to make sure it’s working properly. It’s not uncommon for a system to APPEAR to be backing up when in reality, it’s not. We see companies pay out big money to to get back the data they THOUGHT they've already backed up? Act now, to prevent this from happening to you.

Step #3: Keep A Back Up Somwhere Other Than Your Office

What happens if a major disaster struck your office, like a typhoon or huge fire, destroying all your back up tapes, CDs or hard drive? What happens if your restaurant gets robbed and they take EVERYTHING? Making an off-site back up is simply a smart way to make sure you have multiple copies, so you'd never loose your important files ever.

Step #4: Be Sure To Use Antivirus To Protect Your Files

You would have to be living under a rock to not know how devastating a virus can do to your network. With virus attacks coming from spam, downloaded data, infected web sites, and even e-mails from friends, you cannot afford to not be protected.

A virus does not only damage your data and bring down your network, but it can hurt your reputation. If you or one of your employees unknowingly spreads a virus to a customer, or if the virus hijacks your e-mail address book, you’re going to make a lot of people very angry and disappointed.