Serious Disaster Recovery Plan For Internet Marketing Business

If your internet marketing business is totally stopped for a day because of a disaster caused either by natural or human effort, estimate how much money would you lose?

There are many possible disasters could happen to ANYONE with a mission critical internet marketing business.
(if you are the lucky one that your business is NOT fully depending on the online and computer resources, you can skip the below content

Please examine the following possible disasters.

Hardware equipment failures by misuse, stealing, or worn out.

Data loss created by human error: delete files, over writes data, format hard drive

Intrusion:What about theft stealing your computer equipment or data?
What about computer virus wipe out all your information? What about hacking into your computer and destroy your hard drive?

Accident: What about fire at your office or home office? What about electricity outage?

Nature disaster: What about earth quake? Hurricane?

If ANY of the above disaster happen to you, the impact is ranged from several hours of business interruption to more dramatic consequence like rebuilding several business systems and processes from scratch, or in the extreme case: seize of business.

Hopefully by now you already figure out how much it would cost you if your business stop working for a day.

It is because if you know that figure, you would clearly know the opportunity financial cost of lacking a serious disaster recovery plan for your internet marketing business.

The term "disaster recovery" may seems remote to you, but it is a common term in the IT industry.

That is part of the business continuity planning.

Business continuity planning is to create a plan for seamlessly operating a business so that the business operation can continue under stressful conditions like financial crisis, natural disasters, or other security risks.

For internet marketing business, most of the operations are achieved through various online resources.

So the business continuity planning for internet marketing business is to build a fault-tolerant business system.

A fault-tolerant system is a system that continue to operate properly in the event of the failure of some of it components.

Building System Redundancy and Data Backup
Building system redundancy is to create a set of spare resources to standby as replacement just in case the main resource is not working.

There are two popular methods to create redundancy: they are the "2x Method" and the "N+1 Method"

2x Method

is to duplicate with 100% the original resources in case the main resources is not recoverable. For example, if you just need 1 computer to operate your business, you can purchase another piece of computer with same set of configuration (keyboard, display, mouse and so forth) to standby in case your computer is stolen or totally breakdown.

N+1 Method

comes to play when 2x Method is too much to prepare. For example, if you need 1 desktop computer and 1 notebook to run your online business, it would be too much to prepare double amount of resources because the odd about they both break together is rather small. Instead, it would be good enough to prepare a spare of either another notebook or desktop.

Data replication or data backup is to store the same set of data across another or multiple storage devices at real time or at a certain pre-defined period of time.

The best practice of data replication is to replicate the data into DIFFERENT PHYSHICAL locations. That can dramatically reduce the risk of losing everything when a disaster like fire or burglary wipes out a single location (like your office).

Fault-tolerant System and Disaster Recovery
Here are the tools you can use to build a fault-tolerant infrastructure for your internet marketing business.

#1- UPS (Uninterruptible power supply)
Basically, it is a chargeable battery sit between the main power supply and your computer equipment. In case of electricity outrage at your office, you can have the business continuity and avoid wiping out all the current data with a UPS. Since the notebook is very popular nowadays, it is less critical unless your online business is depends on desktop computer heavily. With a notebook, we can go to Starbuck and continue our work if the electricity is out at office.

#2- NAS (Network Area Storage)
NAS is a storage device attached to the LAN (Local Area Network). The access of NAS is shared out to users at the LAN with different access permission levels. It is built to centralize data in one place.

One of the key features of NAS is the ability to use 2 hard disks together and mirror the data from a hard disk exactly into another hard disks at real time. If another one of the hard disks is broken mechanically, there is still another perfect copy of data ready to use. And by replacing the broken hard disk, NAS can quickly duplicate the complete set of data back to the new one. (Caution: since the mirroring is transparent to us, we only see NAS as a normal hard disk. If we wipe the data by mistake, we lose them at both original and mirror copies)

#3 – Data Backup
The higher level of business redundancy is data backup. Since we are depending on more online tools to run our internet marketing business, we are a collection of application data to backup.

It takes us YEARS to build our business system data like customers list, JV partners list, mindmap. checklist, business ideas notes, bookmarks, or blog content. For the hardware failures, we can easily replace them quickly by paying plastic or cash. Unfortunately, we cannot buy those data back elsewhere without a backup.

Email backup
If we use desktop email clients like Outlook or Thunderbird, we have a copy of the email in our hard disk. By using the mirroring feature in NAS, we are building a backup copy already.

What about backup online email service like Gmail?
Check the official Gmail support page.

Blog content backup
Have you heard about a website or a blog is attacked by the hacker and lose all the content at the hosting account?

Backing up a website is more simple because we have the copy at hard drive before doing the ftp upload.

To backup our blog content at the hosting account, we can either use Microsoft Live Writer (an offline blog writer) to synchronize data or use a WordPress plugin like BackupBuddy or BackUpWordPress to automate the backup process.

Social Media Accounts Backup
Backupify is the one stop shop backup solution to archive your social media content like Gmail, Google Docs, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and many other services.

Online remote data backup solutions
The most logical data backup solution is to duplicate all the critical data into a different remote location to isolate the possible disaster.

There are online backup solutions like Mozy, Dropbox, Carbonite, or JungleDisk to let you backup unlimited data. Some charge a flat fee while others are charging with the storage size. It is still a worthy solution to pay monthly in case a disaster distroyed all the business data built up in all these years.

Backup data is first part of disaster recovery plan. The most vital part of disaster recovery of an online business is "data restoration". It is no good to backup data if we cannot restore them properly.

Disaster Recovery Plan
Here are what you can do to test run your disaster recovery plan.
#1. Imagine a fire alarm goes off in your office and you have to run within 5 minutes, what are the steps you would take in those 5 minutes?
#2. Pretend you are safe from the disaster now, but your business system is destroyed. What are the steps you would take to put it back?
#3. Test restoring your data from the backup copy you have created. Are you able to recover those data? And how long it would take?

Lastly, there is one last piece of VERY IMPORTANT resource you need to plan building continuity seriously.

That unique resource is YOU. You need that ‘backup’ when you want a vacation

Ultimately, you would be thinking "How Can I Replace Myself?"

By replacing ourselves with other high-performance people and let them to run our business smoothly without us in the day to day operation, we can truly have a business (not a job).

In fact that is the entrepreneurial secret of how a business can grow rapidly without letting the founder be the bottle neck.

That is also the internet lifestyle secret of how we can work less and earn more.

That is the ultimate strategy how an internet entrepreneur can have more vacations and earn more money AT THE SAME TIME.

Once the business owner or founder breakthroughs this level of thinking, the business can easily grow continuously. And in most cases the growth is much faster when the business owner is not working in the internet marketing business.

Check out "ReplaceMyself" here.

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