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Ever Lost Tons of Hours Recovering Your Restaurant Computer Data?

October 21, 2009

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

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

A lot of retail business owners tend to neglect 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 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 can cost them between ,000 – ,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 have found that most restaurant owners don’t think about the importance of regular preventative maintenance and disaster recovery planning because they are already very busy with more immediate mundane fires that demands their attention. If the POS system and network works 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 in good shape.

Below Are The 4 Most Important Things You Should Do To Be Sure Your Company Is Protected From Any Type Of Disasters:

While it’s! impossible to plan for every potential computer disaster or emergency, there are a few easy and inexpensive measures you can put into place that will help you avoid the huge majority of computer disasters you could experience.

Step#1: Make Sure You Are Backing Up Your System

It just amazes me how many businesses fail to back up their computer network. Think about this: you write the most important piece of information you could ever write on a chalk board and I come along and erase it. How are you going to get it back? There’s absolutely no way! Unless you can remember it, or if YOU WROTE A COPY OF IT, you can’t recover the data then it is gone. That is why it is very important to create a back up for your network. There are a number of things that can cause you to lose data files. If the data you keep within your computer is very important for your business, make sure to create more than just one copy of it.

Step #2: Perform A Complete Data Restore Making Sure Your Backups Works Fine

Another huge mistake I see. A lot of restaurant owners set up some type of backup system, but they never check to make sure it’s working properly. Take note is not uncommon for a system to LOOK LIKE it’s backing up when in reality, it’s not. We see companies pay out huge amount of money to regain data they THOUGHT they’ve already 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 typhoon totally destroys your server as well as all your backup tapes, CDs or drive? What happens if your restaurant gets robbed and EVERYTHING was taken? Having an off-site back up is simply and an intelligent way to make sure you have multiple, redundant copies of your data.

Step #4: Be 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 do to your network. Computer virus attacks coming from spam mails, downloaded data, infected web sites, and even from emails sent by your friends, you cannot afford to not be protected.

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

 

The author Michael Tash is the Vice President of Customer Relations at POS-For-Restaurants. And with over 20 years of restaurant Point of Sale experience, POS-For-Restaurants helps you use your technology to be more efficient, be aware of the dangers that could happen and more profitable.

POS-For-Restaurants.com is an online source of information about Restaruant Point of Sale Systems.

 

 

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