I recently heard about a friend of a friend (this is not an urban myth – but reality), who had the misfortune to “lose” his bag in a bar in London. Once he realised it had gone his first thoughts were, “what’s in there – laptop, wallet, car keys, and oh heck – house keys”. Within his wallet was £150 cash, 5 credit & debit cards, loads for loyalty / store / membership cards. Then it was a case of “what have I got?” Well the phone and Oyster card were in his pocket so he could get home and call ahead. Wrapping up at the bar and with scant consolation that his mates had to pick up the tab, he headed of home.

During the journey the realisation of the impact of the loss hit home. After cancelling a number of the cards he started to list all that he had lost – an activity that took 2 weeks as things forgotten come back to mind. Once at home thoughts turned to the laptop. Fortunately he had taken a back up only a week or so previously via a network based PC backup facility. Mail was all served via a Hosted Exchange provider – so that would all be there. So it was fairly easy for him to get back up and running in terms of files and e-mail. However even then he still needed to restore all the local settings and configurattion – maybe, he thought, image back-ups are the way to go!

Eventually all his cards were re-issued and various items were covered under insurance – but not all. Some weeks later he took to capturing some thoughts on the whole experience by way of advice for others – take or leave it, but you never know, one day this may be useful to you:

-          get you laptop / PC backed up regularly to somewhere that is a different location to where your laptop normally is (no point in losing your PC and the back-up)
-          check you security and encryption, we all keep sensitive details on laptops – what could be accessed if it falls into unscrupulous hands
-          make sure your e-mail is mirrored somewhere if not hosted
-          have a set of spare keys somewhere
-          have a list of what you carry around to be able to easily recount all that may have gone
-          backup you phone contents

KPMG have conducted some research which shows that more than 280 million people around the world have been hit by data loss incidents in the last three years!!

They found that there were 1034 such incidents reported between June 2005 and June 2008, while 50 per cent of cases occurring within organisations.

These figures just set alarm bells ringing in my head, what on earth would I do if I lost everything on my computer? For starters I would lose all of my documents, some I admit are probably not worth worrying about and just notes from a meeting or similar, but some documents were started months ago and have been added to, amended and grown over time – would I ever be able to recreate them, how can I remember what I and others said to make that document so valuable? What about all my contacts and emails, again how would I remeber them all as everything is kept online now, not in offline address books or notes.

I have come to realise that like in my personal life, so many things can be taken for granted and you can ‘wander’ through life in and out of work thinking that will never happen to me, someone will be able to sort that out for me if it goes wrong, or someone will pick that up for me. But won’t it? Will they?

We have come to live in a very online world, doing nearly everything online from shopping, banking and chatting to saving documents, talking and searching – should we not all be responsible for what happens to the life we lead online? In a world where it is so easy for a stranger to take data, recreate a new life for themselves or utilise your work, it is time we all sit up and take stock of just how easy it is for our business lives to come crashing down.

I for one am very wary of backing everything up, as I truly feel that if I lost everything (one email is bad enough!) I would have to start from scratch, rebuild everything I have found, written and stored over my working years, and not only would that mean work for me, but also would be letting others down on the projects I am involved in – my business life would come to a stop very quickly and for some time. I say this as an employee too, not someone who is responsible for a whole business and the data stored within!

Take some time to think about what would happen to your business if a security breach or data loss happened? How would you rectify it? Could you get your work or entire business back? These figures are frightening and I fear that they continue to multiply as too many people think – it will never happen to me!

Things you may want to read about: Data Backup, Server Backup, Security Guide