How To Save Money On Your Backups
Do you know how to Save Money On Your Backup? Do you know what you are backing up? I mean do you really know?
I am amazed at how many small businesses I talk to that are backing up items that they know they don’t need. Old documents that are no longer needed, Reports and temporary files that should have been deleted long ago. It’s easy to accumulate, it’s hard to clean out.
Here’s some motivation.
If you can delete 5Gb of “stuff” then you should be able to reduce your backup plan by 5Gb. If there are four of you in the office and you each manage to get rid of 5Gb, well now you’re talking a 20Gb reduction! That’s a good saving on any plan.
How To Clean Up
- Get rid of those old spreadsheets you created to crunch some numbers quickly, and delete revisions 3,4,5,6,7 of that document. Delete the pictures of the old employees who no longer work there. Remove the PDF documents you downloaded to review.
- Delete the items in your Downloaded folder. Every browser keeps those files, often in a folder called “downloads”. Go find it and remove all the applications, pictures, and everything else there. If you really need it you can go get it again.
- Clean up Outlook. Delete everything in your Deleted, and Sent folders. Then go to your Control Panel and select the Mail icon and run an Optimize. (Outlook doesn’t really delete them until you Optimize the Outlook database) Check your file size on your Outlook.pst and you’ll see the difference.
- Delete all pictures and music you don’t need. These types of items take up more space than documents and spreadsheets so get rid of as many as you can.
What if I delete something I need?
Let’s say you get a little too trigger happy and come Monday morning you realize a document is missing. No problem, CloudPockets has, by default, a 7 day retention period. This means that old versions of files are saved for 7 days before they are deleted on the server. (you can change this to any number of days you want).
If you really need to you can get that file back.
Now you know how to Save Money On Your Backup.
Okay ’nuff talking, schedule some time now for this afternoon and clean up – and then go have a great weekend!