Maintaining your computer is essential to your business. In most cases, valuable data is stored on your PC and if you're not making back-ups, a hard drive failure or virus has the potential to wipe that data out making it either impossible to retrieve or having to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars to retrieve potentially lost data.

The following schedule will help ensure the PCs in your home, office or home office are always running the latest version of your operating system and other key applications.

Daily Maintenance

Operating System Updates

Though not necessarily something that should be done daily, it is highly recommended to perform system updates on a regular basis. The manufacturer of your operating system (PC or MAC) is probably releasing patches to the OS (operating system) on a regular basis to resolve defects they've found through additional testing or that have been reported by other users. You should update your operating system on a regular basis.

Daily Backups

You must have a backup plan in place to protect your data. You don't need to back-up software -- but you should be backing up data that is created in the course of your operations. All your data files should be stored in a central location making it easier to back-up this data. If you're running accounting software or other applications, and the data is being stored elsewhere find out where and ensure that you're backing it up.

You can back-up to CDs, DVDs, tapes, ZIP drives and even floppy disks and "thumb" or micro-drives. Your backups should also be stored in a safe place. If you have a safe -- put them there, or in a safety deposit bos or fire-safe box.

Other things you may want to consider are back-up servers, if you're running a network in your office. Though this is typically a more expensive solution and is usually required in larger companies where there is greater dependency on computer systems.

Internet Access and Downloads

Do you provide your employees with Internet access and the ability to download and visit any site they wish? If so, you could be opening the doors to a lot of trouble -- from employees downloading and installing non-licensed software or visiting websites that install spyware or other malicious software. You need to consider solutions, that are relatively inexpensive that limit what your employees can do on the web and if required you can monitor what they are doing (but this presents a whole host of privacy issues that you may need to deal with).

Weekly Maintenance

Anti-Virus Updates

Viruses are one of the main causes of data and system integrity issues. If you don't have virus checkers on your PCs, including servers then you're opening yourself up to trouble. If you've got virus checkers installed, but are not downloading updates atleast once or twice-per-week, you're opening yourself up to trouble. If you've not even bothered to maintain the software by purchasing upgrades -- you're opening yourself up to trouble.

Virus checkers work, and they are not expensive to purchase. Updates are free for one year and you need to purchase yearly updates for a modest fee. We highly recommend installing virus checkers on all your PCs including your servers, this is especially important if you offer Internet connectivity through the office.

Ensure that the software is installed, and configured correctly. There is no value in having the software installed, if it isn't set-up properly. You should be scanning everything, and anything. Be paranoid!

Remember to download anti-virus updates on a regular basis. We have our virus scanner to check for updates on a daily basis and to automatically download updates. Though daily updates may not be required, you should be checking atleast once per week at a minimum.