Christmas is just around the corner, and the whole country is looking forward to getting together with family and friends for some well-deserved R & R.

For many small business owners, though, the pleasures of the holiday season are tempered with one nagging stress: is my business safe?

Brent Larsen, general manager of business IT vendor NSP, says 60% of companies that lose their data will close down within six months, and 72% will disappear within two years.

With 40% of small businesses not backing up their data at all, that’s a big concern.

"Even though [the Christmas break] may only be 10 days, over the short period of time things do go wrong,” Larsen says.

Of those that are backed up, 40-50% are not fully recoverable, and 60% fail in some way, Larsen says.

The figures are scary, but Larsen says it’s not all about doom and gloom.

"We had one customer that we’d been telling for months they needed a redundant backup solution. They finally got one, but they put it in the accountant’s office. We’d advised them to take it to a different location, but they didn’t.”

In the middle of the night, the customer’s warehouse burnt down.

"They got the fire brigade to break into the office and get the box. We were able to throw that data onto a new box, and we had them up and running out of our boardroom by 8:00 the next morning.”

Customers were so impressed by the company’s reliability the disaster wound up attracting a chunk of new business.

"The customers thought, ‘if they can come back from that, they’re the kind of people we want to work with’,” Larsen says.

To really appeal to small business owners, Larsen is offering a new backup-in-a-box service, including a backup server & license, imaging software, 2TB of data storage, a pair of rotational storage devices, installation, monitoring and management, for $222 per month.

All the business owner has to do is rotate the storage devices and ensure one is always off-site.

The service fits between NSP’s iBackup remote offsite backup service, which starts at $10 per month for 500MB of data, and its Smarti Bare Metal Image Recovery backup, which offers 100GB of storage offsite and allows recovery without needing previously installed software or matching hardware. This service costs $240 per month.

Larsen says all these can be tailored for requirements of specific businesses.

"You only have to look at how many people were trying to get into the red zone after the Christchurch quake to get their servers,” Larsen says.

Go here for more on NSP's backup solutions.