By Marty Pennoni

Back up your data daily! Backing up every night is not negotiable. It's not open for discussion. No whining, no complaining, no excuses. Just do it.

The first step to establishing a solid process is to identify the hardware/software solution you will use. This can range from manually writing your database to media such as CD/R or Zip to an automatic backup using tape, DAT, or ADR drives and programs such as Retrospect.

Next, assign a person to be responsible for implementation, and make it a top priority component of their job. Also assign a backup person who will take over if the responsible person can't perform their duties.

If your backup is stored on site, then take a weekly backup off site. For 18 years in multiple businesses, I always took a weekly backup off site in case of a disaster. I never needed to use it, but one of my competitors was fortunate to have been following the same procedure when his building burned to the ground.

When I worked at an agency, our Clients & Profits database became corrupted late in the day. Because a nightly database backup was the highest of priorities, we simply copied the previous day's backup back onto the server, then recreated a day's worth of work.

Had we backed up weekly, recreating data would have been a huge and costly problem. No backups would have been a disaster.

Periodically, it's a good idea to restore a backup and access it&endash;just to be sure you, and someone else, know how to do it, if needed.

If as you read this you don't have a current backup, close everyone out of Clients & Profits, grab a CD burner, Zip, another computer or whatever, and copy your data. Then before day's end, establish a backing up routine and stick to it!