When we hear stats like over half of small businesses are not prepared for data loss, or that 60% of small businesses that incur data loss will close within 6 months we cringe a little bit. We know everyone talks about doing backups, though most of the time it is a topic of putting something in place but not right now as there are other more important tasks to tackle. Well guess what? Data failure is not going to wait for you to be ready. It is also not a matter if but when.Putting all your QuickBooks files on a USB drive to take home is a great start (something is better than nothing) but yet that distracts you from your busy day. We as humans are not always the most diligent, we forget. When is the last time you actually copied those files over? Or more importantly when is the last time you checked to make sure those files actually restore?Industry standard is to have at least two backups of your main data. So three copies total. Usually one backup set is kept close by as a quick means of restore. The second set of data is meant to be kept far away from your office. We call this the Backup 3 2 1 rule.No, backups are not something that are shiny and cool to show off to your friends but are obviously really important. Backups become even more imporant than you think if you fall under any of the ever-growing regulations (HIPAA, PCI, SOX, SOC, GDPR). We won’t go into the details for this page on each regulation, but they all have similar and different requirements to achieve. We actually feel that backups are so important that we include it for all of our clients at no extra cost.