What would you do if you lost all your emails?

Picture this. You open up your laptop after lunch and go to check your emails. Blank. Your inbox is completely empty, along with your client folders. There's nothing there. What on earth are you meant to do now?

Every now and then issues occur with email software (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook) and it acts as a huge reminder of how reliant we are on our emails. If this was to happen, would you be able to run your business as effectively and efficiently, or would you lose time and potential income?

Do you have an alternative communication method, alternative email ready and set up to save downtime?

We all rely on our emails so much and often refer to them to complete our day to day tasks. Unless you are saving your emails to a personal folder and then backing up that folder in some way, you are relying solely on your email provider to save these emails. Recovering these emails may prove very difficult and possibly costly. Not all providers provide a backup so in some cases if you don’t have your own backup you won't be getting those emails back.

Ideally you should treat your emails as part of your regular backup process.

Applying our simple 3, 2, 1, strategy you should:

• Have at least 3 copies of the data including emails (a local copy + 2 backups)
• Make sure you have it in 2 different formats (storage + cloud)
• Make sure 1 copy is held off-site (or online).

You should also test that the backup is working on a regular basis, ideally with an automated report that confirms that the backup has been successful.

This means you should regularly test whether you can restore from your backup, to ensure you can get your emails back should something go wrong.

There are many different ways of protecting your emails, so if you need help putting this system in place, drop me a message! Otherwise, for more tips for business efficiency through IT, check out our blog.