Have you ever thought about what would happen to your company if you were the victim of any kind of disaster? Natural or man-made?

How expensive would the recovery effort be? Would your business be able to recover from such a loss? Where would you even begin the recovery process? All of these questions, and more, should be addressed in your company's disaster recovery plan.

Every single business today, large or small, should have a disaster recovery plan in place for its electronic data. No matter what the size or income of your company is, you need to be able to recover your electronic data if something happens to your servers or to your buildings.

To start to build your disaster recovery plan, you will have some serious choices to make about how you archive your data and where you will store it once it has been backed up.

One option for backing up your data is to back it up on tapes each day. If you have a small amount of data you can perform complete daily backups each evening when no one is in the building and using your file server.

If you choose to backup your data each night, you will need multiple tapes so that you will always have archives to restore from if the need ever arises and you find something wrong with one of your tapes.

If you perform onsite backups then you will need to take your media to an offsite location to store at least once each week. By storing a copy offsite, you make certain that if there is a disaster at your building then your data will still be available to you. This will help you if you have to rebuild your file servers from scratch.

The downside to onsite backup is that it requires you to have an information technology technician to physically change-out tapes. And, more importantly, they need to remember to move your media tapes offsite each week.

Another downside to localizing the task is that the media tapes can be very expensive to purchase, and you will probably need many of them for your nightly and weekly replication tasks.

A more attractive option to using onsite data backup is to perform all of your replication to an offsite backup location. You can do this by utilizing a professional online backup service.

To use a professional online data backup service you would simply schedule a time for your server to connect to your backup service and duplicate your data onto their server. The data will travel over the Internet, through a secure and encrypted channel.

There are many big advantages to using an online data backup service. You do not have to purchase tapes and tape drives. You do not have to have someone remember to physically change your tapes, and remember to bring them to an offsite location.

And, your data is much safer being stored a long way away from your business, in a safe and secure computing environment.

It is vital to the existence of your business to address the issue of backing up and storing your electronic data. By making a disaster recovery plan, which includes online backup services, you can be assured your data is safe and secure in case you need it for any reason.