Imagine wasting hours, days or even weeks of work – or imagine losing your menu database, employee records, financial records, and all of the files your restaurant has ever produced or compiled since it was built.

What if a major storm, flood, or fire destroyed your office and all of your files? Or if a virus ruined your server… do you have an emergency recovery plan in place that you feel confident in? How quickly do you think you could recover, if ever?

Many retail business owners tend to neglect or fail to notice taking steps to secure their company’s network from these types of misfortune until disaster strikes. By that time it’s too late and the damage is done.

After working with very many restaurants in the Mid-Atlantic area, we noticed that 6 out of 10 businesses will experience some type of major network or technology disaster that will end up costing them between ,000 to ,000 in repairs and restoration costs on average. That doesn’t even include lost productivity, sales, and lost customers due to their down POS systems or network.

I have found that most restaurant owners doesn’t realiaze the importance of regular preventative maintenance and disaster recovery planning because they are already occupied with more immediate daily fires demanding their attention. If the POS system and network is in good condition today, it goes to the bottom of the pile of things to worry about. In most cases, no one is watching to make sure the back ups are working, the antivirus is up-to-date, or that the network is in tip top shape.

The 4 Most Important Things You Should Do To Be Sure Your Company Is Protected From All Types Of Disasters:

While it’s! impossible to plan for every potential computer disaster or emergency, there are some easy and inexpensive measures you can do instead that will help you avoid the vast majority of computer disasters you could experience.

Step#1: Make Sure You Have a Back Up of Your System

It just amazes me how many businesses forget to back up their computer network. Think about this: you write the most important piece of information you could ever write on a chalk board and I come along and erase it. How are you going to get it back? There’s absolutely no way! Unless you have memorized it, or if YOU WROTE A COPY OF IT, you can’t recover the data then it is long gone. That is why it is really important to back up your network. There are a number of things that can cause you to lose data files. If the information on the disk is important to you, make sure you have more than one copy of it.

Step #2: Perform A Complete Data Restore To Be Sure Your Backups Works Perfectly As Expected

Here’s another huge mistake commonly seen. Many restaurant owners sets up a backup system, but then never care to check to make sure it’s working properly. It’s uncommon for a system to LOOK LIKE it’s backing up when in reality, it’s not. We have seen companies pay out big money to recover data they THOUGHT they’ve already backed up? Don’t let this happen to you.

Step #3: Keep A Back Up Somwhere Other Than Your Office

What happens if a fire or typhoon damages your server as well as all your backup tapes, CDs and drive? What happens if your restaurant had a break in and EVERYTHING was taken? Making an off-site back up is simply a smart way to keep multiple, redundant copies of your data.

Step #4: Be Sure Your Antivirus Is ALWAYS On And Up-To-Date

You would have to be living under a rock to not know how devastating a virus can be to your network. Computer virus attacks coming from spam mails, downloaded data, visiting infected web sites, and even from emails sent by your friends, you cannot afford to not be protected.

A virus does not only destroy your office files and bring down your network, but it can hurt your reputation. If you or one of your employees accidentally spreads a virus to a customer, or if the virus hijacks your e-mail address book, you’re going to make a lot of people very angry and disappointed.

The author Michael Tash is the Vice President of Customer Relations at POS-For-Restaurants. And with over 20 years of restaurant Point of Sale experience, POS-For-Restaurants can help you use your technology to be more efficient, be aware of the dangers that could happen and more profitable.

POS-For-Restaurants.com is your online source of information about restaurant POS system hardware, software and support.

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