As business owners increasingly rely on today's sophisticated smart phones in their daily operations, their handheld devices are accumulating critical business and personal data should be backed up routinely.

Just like your desktop and laptop computers and servers, mobile devices play an increasingly important role in supporting your business, and contain important (and often sensitive) information that needs to be protected.

A proper backup schedule and procedure can help you prevent a small technical problem from escalating into a business crisis.

Over-the-Air Protection

Mobile device users have a variety of methods for backing up and protecting important data, starting with over-the-air syncing of mobile data to a desktop PC or server. Over-the-air synching allows you to make changes to your schedule or contact data, and wirelessly send the additional or corrected data to your work PC.

Over-the-air synching can also be scheduled to take place daily or whenever is convenient for you. Scheduling over-the-air backups to take place automatically is especially important for workers who are frequently out of the office, or who may be on extended business trips.

While designed to make sure the data on your handheld and PC matches, over-the-air synching also performs a valuable backup function by providing you with a second copy of important business data.

In addition to the built-in backup applications, a number of third-party programs have been developed for Apple's iPhone, RIM's Blackberry series, and other popular smart phone platforms.

Offline Backup

While over-the-air backup is important, it's also helpful to copy information directly to your PC at least weekly. A direct backup may be faster than an over-the-air transfer, especially if you have a large amount of contact data and other files on your mobile device.

iPhone data (contacts, call history, text messages, mail account information, videos and photos) is backed up automatically whenever a handset is connected to a PC running the iTunes application. The data can then be synched to the appropriate contact management and calendar applications.

Similarly, Blackberry users can connect their handheld to their PC and launch the Desktop Manager program to backup similar data on their devices.