We often talk about the importance of creating backups when you run an SMB or indeed a large enterprise. But we forget that it is just as essential as the independent professionals, freelancers, freelancers and other self-employed persons make backups.
If you’re an entrepreneur or self-employed professional and you’re wondering why you should create backup copies of your documents, files, archives or jobs, in this post we will give you some compelling reasons why you should take this seriously.
Reasons to create backups if you are freelance or self-employed.
There are more than 3,200,000 freelancers in usa, which implies that many physical people have to use their own means to sell products or services. Managing your business is not easy and requires investment, but one of the points that many professionals neglect is undoubtedly to have a good computer management that allows them to protect their data and those of their customers.
If you are self-employed and manage a large amount of data and documents, it is essential that you make backups to protect yourself from the economic, legal and commercial consequences of losing such information, due to the action of a computer virus or a problem with your computer.
We are going to give you some reasons why you should take backups very seriously.
1. You can lose money and customers.
If you are doing a large job and you lose the document because a virus infects your computer, all the effort you have put in will go down the drain and you probably won’t be able to deliver your work on time.
2. Legal consequences.
As a freelancer, you must also protect your customers’ personal data. If their data falls into the hands of third parties because someone has managed to install spyware on your computer, you will most likely be legally liable and you will risk the consequences.
3. It can affect your productivity.
If you don’t make backups and you lose important work, documents, files, you can lose precious time trying to fix the problem. Time you subtract from profitable activities and, therefore, a loss of productivity for your business.
4. Organizational and business knowledge problems.
The loss of internal documents of an organizational nature can also be a problem for your company’s documentary capital. In this sense, some companies prefer to manage their data in the cloud to avoid the risks of losing reports, data and business knowledge.
5. Tax issues.
Another problem for a freelancer would be to lose tax documents at a bad time, although those that have already been delivered to the Tax Agency via online may be recoverable.
What is the best way to create backups for freelancers?
This is where the biggest difficulty arises, as many freelancers use rudimentary methods to make their backups. Ways that, due to their risks and low professionalism, could result in a low level of data protection.
As a freelancer, you should rule out the following ways of backing up:
- Copies to USB memory stick, as it can be easily misplaced or broken.
- Copies to hard disk: same as USB memory sticks.
- Copies to CD or DVD, something very heavy and complex to perform on a daily basis, which in the long run is not very functional.
- Copies in storage systems with servers abroad, since if you upload data from third parties, you would be in breach of the Organic Law on Data Protection.
If we want to make backup copies, the ideal is to have a storage system where we can make automatic and encrypted copies. That way, all the contents we want would be safe, even in the event of unforeseen situations that could cause us to lose all the documents on our computer.
Is it expensive to create professional backups?
If you look at it from a risk point of view, what is really costly is not doing them and then having to suffer the consequences of losing important documentation. Many companies did not see the importance of having a good backup system in place until they were adversely affected by a computer virus and lost valuable documents.
As a freelancer, the information you handle is more sensitive and you have less protection from the possible consequences of losing important work and documents. In this sense, it is advisable to take the appropriate computer protection measures, from the installation of an antivirus, to an automated backup system, only of the really critical files and not of our entire computer.