Avoid Wasting Time and Money On Computer Repairs Due To Inevitable Disasters

Imagine wasting hours, days or even weeks of work – or imagine losing your menu database, employee records, financial records, and all of the files your restaurant has ever produced or compiled since it was built.

What if a major storm, flood, or fire destroyed your office and all of your files? Or if a computer virus wiped out your server… do you have an emergency recovery plan ready for implemetation that you feel confident in? How quick do you think you could recover, if at all?

Many retail business owners tend to ignore or fail to notice 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 done.

After working with a lot of restaurants in the Mid-Atlantic area, we noticed that 6 out of 10 businesses will experience some type of major network or technology disaster that will end up costing 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 pay much attention about the importance of regular preventive maintenance and disaster recovery planning because they are already very busy with more immediate daily fires which demands more of their attention. If the POS system and network is working fine 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 antivirus is up-to-date, or that the network is “healthy”.

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 cheaper ways 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 formula you could ever write on a chalk board and I come along and erase it. How on earth are you going to get it back? You’re not. Unless you can remember it, or if YOU MADE A COPY OF IT, you can’t recover the data. It is lost. That is why it is so important to back up your network. There are a number of things that could 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: Do A Complete Data Restore Making Sure Your Backups Are Working Fine

This is another huge mistake commonly seen. A lot of restaurant owners set up some type of backup system, but then never care to check to make sure it’s working right. Take note is not uncommon for a system to LOOK LIKE it's backing up when in reality, it’s not. We see companies shell out huge amount of money to to get back the data they THOUGHT they backed up? Do not let this happen to you.

• Step #3: Keep An Offsite Copy Of Your Backups

What happens if a fire or typhoon damages your server AND the backup tapes and drive? What happens if your restaurant had a break in and took EVERYTHING? Making an off-site back up is simply a smart way to have multiple, redundant copies of your data.

• Step #4: Make Sure Your Antivirus Is ALWAYS On And Up-To-Date

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

A virus does not only corrupt your office files and bring down your network, but it can hurt your reputation. If you or one of your employees unwittingly spreads a virus to a customer, or if the virus has penetrated your e-mail address book, you’re going to make a lot of people very angry.