Today I’m going to teach you about an critically important system you must have for your online business.

I hope you’re paying attention because not having this system could result in a situation that destroys part of or potentially all of your business.

I’m referring to having a Data Backup System for your local computers and your work data.

Of course, everyone knows they should back up their data regularly. Unfortunately, only a small percentage of home & small business computer users do so.

Come on… let’s see a show of hands. Are you guilty of not backing up as well?

That’s ok - you’re far from alone. You’d also be very surprised about who else fails to have even a basic backup system in place.

Last month I did some work for two big name internet marketers. I was working on each of their dedicated servers which hold all of their websites, memberships, products, services, forums, custom software, helpdesk etc. When I asked if those dedicated servers were backed up, what do you think both of these top Internet Marketers told me…

No… but we probably should be doing that.

They’re playing with fire.

If the server hard disk crashed or their servers was hacked they could be out of business instantly.

I had to learn the same lesson the hard way this morning when my Windows XP laptop decided to lock up.

Of course this happened when I was working towards a major promotion deadline. No matter what I did, Windows was unusable. After 2 hours of rebooting in safe mode, going back to restore checkpoints and googling for answers I gave up and decided to re-install from scratch.

At least I’d done one thing right - I’d keep all of my project data on a separate partition to the main Windows partition on my laptop. I also backed up that data partition to my other computer regularly so all of my data was safe.

But… it has still taken 4.5 hours to do a complete reinstall of Windows XP from scratch.

That includes all the time taken to download and reinstall software that I own - Photoshop Elements, Camtasia, firewall, AVG anti-virus etc, all Windows updates and all the annoying reboots (about 10 in total).

If only there was a way to fully restore a computer complete with Windows, all Windows updates, all the software you own and all of your critical work data in less than 30 minutes should disaster strike.

There is!

With 30 minutes initial preparation and another 10-15 minutes each week your computer data can be kept completely backed up and safe and reinstalled immediately should disaster strike.

Go to http://www.acronis.com and download the trial of the Acronis True Image software.

This software allows you to create a full “image” of your computer’s hard drives - including both the operating system and data.

By “image” I mean it creates an EXACT duplicate of the data stored on your hard disk. If you ever need to do a full reinstall, you simply use Acronis True Image to copy the “image” straight back to your hard drive - there’s no need to install windows first, windows updates or your applications again - they’re all already there!

Once you have your initial “image” backed up to an external drive, or burnt to DVD you’re safe should anything happen.

From there you can do incremental image backups each week, meaning that only the files that have changed are backed up and can be reinstalled in minutes along with your full backup.

This is a very simple and effective way to create backups for all of the data on your local computers and I highly recommend it. I should have had this system in place already so that when disaster struck this morning I could have returned my computer back to the exact state it was in a few days ago in 20 minutes.

Acronis True Image costs US$50 for the home user edition and it is well worth the investment. It’s easy to use, simple and smart - for example it chops your image backups into DVD sized files so you can easily burn hard copies of your backups for off site storage.

If you have critical data on your computer(s) that would cause you major problems should something happen, then having a backup system like this is a MUST.

And on that note Acronis True Image has just finished building a full image for my freshly installed laptop in less than 9 minutes. Should the same problem strike again I’ll be up and running again in 20 minutes instead of 5 hours.

Here’s that link again:

http://www.acronis.com

By the way… for those of you who have heard of Norton Ghost - the software is similar. My brother (who put me onto Acronis) used Norton Ghost for for a number of years and now swears by Acronis says:

Norton Ghost wasn’t very user friendly and was difficult to use. At the time it required reboots to DOS whereas Acronis would work while windows running.

Having regular Acronis backups has been a lifesaver on many occasions.

Numerous times for lost files… twice for a completely corrupt windows partition that wouldn’t boot, and several times for reverting to a previous clean install state once windows had become clogged up.

In the next issue of the Website Systems Expert Online Newsletter I’m going to give you something valuable to help you with your websites - a pack of graphic header templates. Not only that I’m going to give you step by step video instructions showing you how you can customize those templates to create powerful and compelling header graphics for your own websites.

To your success!
(And safely backed up data!)

Phill Coxon
WebsiteSystemsExpert.com