Avoid Tons of Hours Recovering Lost Restaurant Computer Data
Imagine wasting tons of hours of work – or imagine losing your restaurant menu database, employee records, financial records, and all of the data your restaurant has ever produced or compiled.
What if a major disaster hits your restaurant destroying all your files? Or if a virus wiped out your server… do you have an emergency recovery plan in place that you can immediately enforce to save your files? How quickly do you think you could recover, if at all?
A lot of restaurant owners tend to ignore or fail to notice 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 very many restaurants in the Mid-Atlantic area, we found that six out of ten 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 doesn’t realiaze the importance of regular preventative maintenance and disaster recovery planning because they are already occupied with more immediate day to day fires which demands more of their attention. If the POS system and network works properly 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.
Below Are The 4 Most Important Things You Should Do To Be Sure Your Company Is Protected From All Types Of Disasters:
While it is impossible to plan for every potential computer disaster or emergency, there are a few easy and cheaper ways you can do instead that will help you prevent the vast majority of computer disasters you could experience.
Step#1: Be Sure You Are Backing Up Your System
It just amazes me how many businesses never back up their computer network. Imagine 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 will you be able to get it back? No way! Unless you have memorized it, or if YOU STORE A COPY OF IT, you can’t recover the data. It’s long gone. That is why it is very important to create a back up for your network. There are numerous things that can cause you to lose data files. If the information on the disk is important to you, make sure you have more than one copy of it.
Step #2: Perform A Complete Data Restore Making Sure Your Backups Works Properly
This is another big mistake I see. A lot of restaurant owners sets up a backup system, but then 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 isn’t. We have seen companies pay out huge amount of money to regain data they THOUGHT they’ve backed up? Don’t let this happen to you.
Step #3: Keep A Back Up Somwhere Other Than Your Office
What happens if a fire or flood destroys your server AND the backup tapes or drive? What happens if your restaurant had a break in and they take EVERYTHING? Keeping 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: Make Sure You Install and Regularly Update Your Antivirus Software
You would have to be living under a rock to not know how extremely damaging a virus can do to your network. With virus attacks coming from spammers, downloaded data, web sites, and even e-mails from friends, you cannot afford to not be protected.
Not only can a virus destroy your office files and bring down your network, but it can hurt your reputation. If you or one of your employees accidentally 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 and disappointed.
The author Michael Tash is the Vice President of Customer Relations at POS-For-Restaurants. With over 20 years of restaurant experience, POS-For-Restaurants helps you use your technology to be more efficient and more profitable.
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