How would you manage your business for that day, and the days following, if you couldn’t access any of your business records, inventory, e-mail archives, or customer-contact information? Obviously you couldn’t just report your loss to the insurance company and have them replace it. Buildings and equipment can be rebuilt or repurchased, but data lost is lost forever. Can you imagine the potential damage to your business as a result of this one-time event? In fact, you may not be able to operate at all.

Here is a plan for your business data to survive almost any catastrophe.

As a business owner, you are ultimately responsible for the survival of your business data, including your e-mail system, business records, customer-contact lists, inventory, etc. You need to make sure your corporate data would not suddenly disappear should your business suffer a catastrophe, whether a hard-drive failure or an actual physical threat to your business premises such as a fire, flood, tornado, earthquake or hurricane.

Visualize your worst-case scenario, and prepare for it.

Let’s picture for a moment that a sudden tornado has destroyed the roof of your main corporate office. The resulting water damage has disabled and corrupted your office records and e-mail system, which were residing on your central servers in the upstairs office. The water has penetrated all parts of your office network equipment, and you are informed that to recover that data would be a forensic nightmare, and very expensive. Believe it or not, you can prepare for even this level of destruction.

What if your technology department had set up a proper backup system? What would have happened that Monday when the hard drive failed? Your computer tech would have reported that you had a hard-drive failure, but that he had already initiated a system restore and you would be up and running in a few minutes.

That may be fine for a Monday-morning disk crash, but what about that tornado? A really diligent technology department can foresee and prepare for this contingency by setting up an off-site remote backup which is performed over the Internet on a regular basis. For instance, your office in Atlanta can maintain a backup copy of the records for your office in Philadelphia.

Many online services are available that provide secure remote storage for your data, protected by your password. Extremely sensitive data can be encrypted before storing it on a third- party backup service so that its contents cannot be viewed without access to the private key.

Gspace is a service provided for free by Google that turns the 2GB of your Gmail account into free online storage. By using this, you can access your files everywhere, and also have a quick backup handy should your laptop be stolen, or its hard drive fail unexpectedly while traveling. There are many different services available that provide remote storage, with a wide range of fees and capabilities.

These kinds of disasters do happen in the real world.

In 1997, during a fire at the headquarters of Credit Lyonnais, a major bank in Paris, system administrators ran into the burning building to rescue backup tapes because they didn’t have offsite copies. Crucial bank archives and computer data were lost.

In 2008, an e-mail server crashed at TeliaSonera, a major Nordic telecom company and internet service provider. It was subsequently discovered that the last serviceable backup set was from December 15, 2007. Three hundred thousand customer email accounts were affected.

Now let’s all say it together: This probably won’t happen to me.

Here’s a good rule of thumb: if it isn’t backed up on two hard drives and one physical form such as a CD, it doesn’t exist. Your business shouldn’t be depending on that data, since you can’t be sure it won’t disappear permanently and suddenly.

The physical copy can be important if you have an electrical surge, lightning strike, or flood that destroys all of the hard drives in the building. Storing the copy hard drive near the original is unwise, since the same fire, flood or electrical surge is likely to damage the backup at the same time. Your backup hard drive may have been in the same building, but the backup CD or DVD would probably survive those threats. Again, having an off-site backup would provide even better protection of your data.

Your backups must be protected from unauthorized access.

Each copy of your backups, whether on a physical CD, DVD or the backup server, must be treated with security in mind. Identity thieves have targeted many corporate backup systems to penetrate security protocols and gain access to personal and corporate information. Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has documented 16 instances of stolen or lost backup tapes (among major organizations) in 2005 and 2006. Affected organizations included Bank of America, Ameritrade, Citigroup, and Time Warner.

Small businesses can invest in a large-capacity external hard drive and set it up with data-protection software to make regular copies of critical files. This can be done for as little as two hundred dollars if you are backing up only a business laptop. The external hard drive, such as the Western Digital MyBook used by this author, is plugged directly into the USB connector of the laptop. The new hard drive shows up under My Computer, and is accessible to the data protection software to save the files you’ve chosen for backup.

Which data protection software should I use?

Choosing a suitable backup program can be a bit tricky since there are so many of them. One can start by looking at Download.com, which offers downloads of a satisfying selection of programs, and choosing one under backup software in the utilities section. Larger corporations would leave the choice of software to their information technology department, but this author chose SyncBack by 2BrightSparks, with a very attractive price of free and an editor’s review of five stars. For the simple cost of reading the manual and setting it up, you can have true peace of mind, and where can you find that nowadays?