It took almost a month, but T Mobile’s Sidekick is back on the market again. The company is selling them again, following a major service outtage that left them scrambling. At first, they were worried they’d lost customer data, including photos. When they were able to restore customer data, they forked over $100 gift cards to customers. The whole exercise was a public relations disaster and a case study in the need for reliable data backup.

Many SMBs don’t survive a major data loss following a disaster. In fact, Gartner estimates that 40% will go out of business if they can’t access data within 24 hours following a major crisis, and another 25% of the businesses that do survive a disaster will fail within two years.

The best way to address the problem is to start with a disaster recovery plan that includes reliable backup for your systems and data. No matter what method you’re using to create your offsite backup — failing over to the cloud, FTP, etc. — you’ll need a rapid response onsite too. You need plans for short-term and long-term emergencies. There are some great articles about how to start a DR plan, but this story outlines some of the things you should avoid when you’re putting it together.

Even the big guys make mistakes when it comes to data backup. The big guys can probably weather the financial upheaval — can you?