When I talked to one of my clients who was close to the fires, what did help a little was that their data was in the cloud. Years ago, we often saw in such emergencies merchant would stay in the shop and do a backup before running. Nowadays although doing the onsite backup is a good idea, the urgency was not there.
With us, unlike many other Point of Sale providers, cloud backup is free!
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Cloud_storage
Data has always been essential to business, in the olden days' Australian bushrangers used to threaten to burn shop keepers books, unless they got paid. It was not a small threat as most shops depended on farmers on lived on credit.
Data is still essential, and although few want to discuss ‘disaster’ in today’s world as these bushfires show your data is under constant threat. Imagine how your business would run without essential banking, customer and inventory data? Computers can be replaced, data cannot be replaced.
There are many advantages for you to do a cloud backup.
1. Access: You get access to your data wherever you have internet access. For example, you can access your company's data from home, overseas on holidays, etc.
2. Reliability: If anything is wrong with your regular backups, you have an emergency set online.
3. Easier to use: Because it is automated, there is less to remember or do, often it can be set up, so it is entirely automatic.
Two significant disadvantages to consider are:
1. The Internet: It will chew up a fair amount of Internet usage. Often people report that it slows down their system. If so, we may need to see what we can do.
2. Size limitations: If your data file grows too big, you may find your backup suddenly stops.
3. Check: You need to check regularly that it is working.
We have put together here a document that can show you how to set up a free cloud backup. Please click here.