This file backup plan will help you bounce back from just about any computer disaster.

Whatever kind of network ties together all the folks in your office, chances are one subset is especially important to you-namely, those devices holding the business data you personally use.

If fires, floods or hackers take down any portion of the corporate network, your company’s IT pros might be able fix the gear and (hopefully) resurrect the last data backup. But you’re the only one who can reconstruct your most recent email exchanges, project edits, accounting entries, budget adjustments and all the other moving parts you monitor on a daily basis. They change by the minute-or certainly more frequently than the most conscientious disc or tape backup regimen. And if your personal workspace goes down, it can take weeks or even longer to reconstruct your complement of programs and their myriad settings and preferences.

Why risk it? With a couple of inexpensive additions to your technology arsenal, along with the right configuration, you can bounce back quickly from crashes and ensure your personal business continuity. Creating this safety net is not difficult or expensive. It won’t interfere with other company systems or add another chore to your hectic workday.
One thing you will have to do is invest in a semi-geeky network-attached storage (NAS) device and spend an hour setting it up. But being crash-proof-or, rather, crash-resistant-is less about gear and more about virtualizing your workspace to make it both secure and available from anywhere. This provides a greater opportunity to work when and where you want, collaborate more easily with colleagues and improve your overall productivity. The time you save will quickly recover the capital costs (see the sidebar, “Your money’s worth”).

connect the dots

The strategy is simply to make better use of the pervasive connectivity already available across the nation and around the world. Local area networks linked to fast Internet access are standard features of the modern office; wireless (Wi-Fi) networks offer Web access to multiple PCs and other electronics in American homes. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, three-quarters of Americans have Internet access and two-thirds of home connections are broadband. Road warriors can get comparable speeds at more than 21,000 Wi-Fi hotspots in U.S. hotels, airports and coffee shops, or over fast-spreading third-generation cell phone services.

Thanks to the Internet, our PCs and other devices are very well-connected-just not very well-coordinated. Luckily, coordination is just a few pieces of equipment away. The first thing you need is a personal NAS device on your home network, with sufficient storage to house a copy of your virtual workspace with all its programs and data exactly as configured. This doesn’t mean the contents of every cell phone, Xbox or DVD you own; just the business-related content of the PCs and other portable devices you use regularly for work. The programs and data belonging to the average business user might use up 10 gigabytes of a standard 80GB drive.

But most NAS devices contain four or more drives with hundreds of gigabytes each, enough space for backups of multiple networked PCs in multiple locations several versions deep. Most use RAID 5 or other data redundancy schemas, so you won’t lose data even if multiple drives fail. And there’s room enough to use your NAS appliance as a central server for software, files and peripherals if you’d like.

Sound expensive? Not really. A quick search of online retailers PC Mall (pcmall.com) and Amazon.com (amazon.com) turns up a dozen small business-oriented appliances delivering from 500GB to a terabyte (1TB = ~1,000GB) of storage for well under $1,000. Some, like Micronet’s 1TB G-Force MegaDisk (micronet.com) emphasize maximum storage for your dollar. Others, like Seagate’s 500GB Mirra Server (seagate.com), are turnkey solutions that come complete with backup software. Both were priced at less than $600 at this writing-a lot less costly than losing data or having your workflow interrupted.

Personally, I use a $600 version of Buffalo Technologies’ TeraStation (buffalotech.com) because it offers enough space to back up a network of devices and is smart enough to do it automatically. It can scale up to 1.6TB of storage across four failsafe RAID 5 drives and be managed by a computing novice. TeraStation needs only a half hour to set up, then just a few minutes a month to manage. Its Memeo AutoBackup (memeo.com)
software keeps an up-to-the-minute, bit-level duplicate of everything I designate as important across my entire network. I click on the drives or folders I want mirrored, and Memeo runs on autopilot after that. For appliances that don’t include this kind of incremental backup software, IBM’s Tivoli ($35, ibm.com) and FarStone’s RestorIT 7 ($40, farstone.com) will do the job.

Personal NAS appliances come in a variety of shapes and sizes, all of them small. TeraStation’s footprint is about that of a six-pack of soda-yet there’s space enough to use it as a traditional server. You can clear your work area by plugging your printer, fax and other peripherals into an NAS appliance housed in a different room. The appliance can also be wirelessly connected to your home Wi-Fi network with an adapter ($65,
various vendors).

These handy appliances will also help prevent the loss of your entire setup, should your computer become one of the 100,000 that the National Lightning Safety Institute estimates are struck by lightning annually. But remember that your NAS is still susceptible to other localized disasters, so you should also keep a copy of your workspace in a remote location.

the office everywhere

There are several ways to keep your workspace extra safe by storing a copy remotely. But the best way is to connect your network to a remote access Web site like BeInSync (beinsync.com), SimDesk (simdesk.com) or GoToMyPC.com (gotomypc.com). You not only back up your backup, but you also create a virtual workspace that’s accessible 24/7 from any PC with an Internet connection.

As an executive in an information economy, you probably waste a lot of time moving the latest versions of files from one worksite to another and back again. Telework facilitator ITAC (workingfromanywhere.org) reports that 45 million Americans work at home on a regular basis. In fact, says ITAC, the typical teleworker has three or four regular workplaces-planes, trains, automobiles, client locations and even vacation destinations.
Working outside the office lets you catch up while commuting or traveling, or after the kids are in bed-but it’s common to waste time figuring out what to take when changing worksites. Remote access Web sites synchronize the files you designate from multiple PCs, so an up-to-date virtual desktop is accessible from any Web connection. Each company has a different method for reaching this goal, but, like your NAS appliance, they can all do it without your active involvement.

Information in transit is protected by the strongest encryption available, so you can use one of these remote sites to make a shared project available to other workgroup members. A personal account with accounting records, email and other frequently changing business files should cost around $15 monthly.

So, for about an $800 tax-deductible business expense, you can secure your company’s information assets, share projects among shifting workgroups, and gain both time and operational flexibility from the capacity to access your workspace anywhere in the world.

It’s not the only way to achieve these ends. But it’s a pretty good way.

Your money’s worth

In a former life, I worked in a half-million-dollar usability lab where we measured the productivity gain realized from, say, upgrading to the next-largest monitor or hard drive. It was startling how much time could be saved by the smallest hardware improvement. Even a few minutes a day, when multiplied by a pro-rata share of a user’s salary, amounts to real money in the course of a year.

Frost & Sullivan demonstrated this recently by giving smartphones to mobile professionals. Researchers found that executive users recaptured 45 minutes a day in downtime when able to make phone calls, answer email and get other work done outside the office. When the typical executive salary was applied, it revealed soft-dollar savings of more than $14,000 per executive per year.

So, how much could you save using NAS and a remote access Web site to become more productive? That’s actually an involved calculation with a lot more variables, but we can try to simplify.

The greatest benefits are the hardest to track: time saved accessing your workspace remotely or collaborating with workmates and bouncing back after a data disaster (or continuing to work during one). Suppose we ignore those and only count time saved backing up data-a task that can take 30 minutes or more a day, depending on the method used.

Let’s be conservative and say automatic, on-demand backups save just five minutes a day. That still adds up to 21 hours a year on a standard five-day work week. Applying the executive billing rate Frost & Sullivan used, it means an annual soft-dollar savings
of $1,575.

Worst case, you’ll recover the $800 or so spent on NAS hardware, software and services in six months. After that, any productivity benefits go right to your bottom line.

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mike hogan (mikhogan.com) is technology editor of Entrepreneur Magazine (entrepreneur.com) and author of Accounting for Nonfinancial Managers (Barnes & Noble Books, 2005).