Although we’re all required to carry liability insurance for our cars, many other types of risk are optional. Politics aside, the idea is that car collisions are likely to result in a debt to others that many can’t afford to pay in a timely manner. Comprehensive coverage is a good idea when you buy a new car, but isn’t required since you would be the one to suffer.

Similarly, there are a number of overhead expenses for businesses like insurance from the same kind of basic insurance up to the expensive but valuable business interruption insurance.

While keeping business records online makes data loss recoverable, it’s worth considering how long it would take to recover. My parents’ all-in-one DSL/router/WiFi recently had the WiFi part go bad -- picking up a dedicated replacement Wifi router was easy, but I spent the rest of the day getting everything running again like it was. First was patching and configuring the new unit, then reconfiguring the printers, smartphones, tablets and laptops. It took a couple weeks to catch all the stragglers like their DVR.

Not to mention how many things you use every day aren’t included in the records QuickBooks or Peachtree are copying to the cloud, like letters you use over and over in customer correspondence.

Data Redundancy and Backups are essentially insurance to help you avoid or minimize these costly interruptions to your business. Much like the variety of insurance options, there are many degrees of protection provided from an inexpensive NAS that stores critical files with much more security to larger centralized system backups and file shares that are copied to the Internet.