What should a business back up, and how often?
A business almost never loses its data to a spectacular failure. It loses it to a phone stolen at a junction, a computer that will not restart, an account nobody has the password to. Five things deserve copying, and one rule is enough.
Published in September 2026
What disappears with a single device
Do the exercise properly: your phone vanishes tonight. What is left?
- Your customer file: names, numbers, order history. Often nowhere but in WhatsApp and the contact list.
- Your quotes and invoices, when they are photographed rather than saved.
- Photos of your sites or products, which are your only proof of work.
- Your access: social accounts, online banking, supplier accounts, email.
- Your site's domain name and hosting, if they are in a provider's name and not yours.
The three-copy rule
Three copies of what matters, on two different media, one of them somewhere other than your office. It is the rule IT people have applied for thirty years, and it fits on one line because it is simple.
In practice, for a small Cameroonian business: the working file on the computer, an automatic copy in online storage, and a monthly copy on an external drive kept elsewhere. The real cost is a few thousand francs a year.
How often, according to what it is worth
The right frequency follows from one question: how much work are you willing to redo? If losing a day is bearable, a daily copy is enough. If losing an hour of invoicing is costly, you need a continuous copy.
- Customers, quotes, invoices: every day, automatically.
- Site and product photos: after every session, before clearing the phone.
- Accounts and payroll: at every close, plus an offline copy.
- Access and passwords: in a manager, never in a notebook or a chat.
A backup you never test does not exist
This is the step almost everyone skips. A copy running every night for two years can be empty, corrupted, or pointed at the wrong folder, and nobody will know until the day it is needed.
Once a quarter, restore a file at random and open it. The exercise takes ten minutes. It is the only way to know the backup really exists.
Questions that come up
WhatsApp already backs up my conversations, is that enough?
No. The WhatsApp backup is tied to an account and a number. Lose or suspend the number and the backup becomes unreachable, and it contains neither your quotes nor your accounts anyway.
Is an external drive enough?
It counts as one copy, not as a system. If it sits in the same office as the computer, a theft or a flood takes both. That is why the rule asks for a copy elsewhere.
What if my website goes down?
First check who owns the domain name and the hosting. A site can be rebuilt; a domain name held by somebody else cannot always be recovered.
Is your case different?
Tell us where you stand. You get an answer about your situation, not a sales pitch.