Best Practices for Data Backup
Your data is the lifeblood of your organization. Without it, you have no idea who is doing what internally, or who is paying you for what externally. And what good is that data if it disappears, never to be seen again? No data protection service or strategy is 100 percent foolproof, so you should have data backup in place for every critical file your organization needs to thrive.
Here are some best practices for data backup you should consider:
- Backup data regularly: You must first identify the files that must be backed up, including documents, pictures, videos and music, and then set up procedures to back up these files regularly to storage devices. Depending on the rate of changes and data criticality, backups can be scheduled to run on a weekly, daily or hourly basis.
- Backup data to onsite and offsite locations: The downfall of onsite backups is if there is a catastrophic failure, or storage devices are stolen, then all the data stored locally will be lost, resulting in complete loss of data and money. Therefore, many organizations store data away from their premises in locations such as servers (accessed via FTP), cloud services, offsite servers, etc., so the data can be fully recovered by accessing it from anywhere in the world via the Internet. Also, malware programs like ransomware, spyware and other viruses easily encrypt data stored on local or network drives, hence keeping an offsite backup is crucial for data recovery.
- Backup with versioning: Versioning allows a user to create multiple versions of a file so the user can restore data from any of the versions available. Versioning preserves all previous file revisions and ensures no data is lost between updates. It also helps in case you need to revert changes of a file, allowing you to quickly restore data from a previous backup.
- Review backup logs or reports: Inspecting log files is a necessary check after each backup to ensure the backup is complete and accurate for any future restore.
- Perform a test restore: It is important that you perform a test restore to ensure that a backup is working correctly, the backup location can be accessed, and the backup is copying the correct files to the correct location.
- Backup application files: Many backup programs create files and databases to store data required to run a backup. These files can be updated, or recreated, whenever a backup is run, so they are critical for backup and recovery of your data.
If this sounds intimidating, leave the backup strategy to the experts here at 2W Tech. We offer a robust, scalable low-cost backup and disaster recovery solution powered by Axcient that can increase the security, performance and availability of your data while delivering on the economics of the cloud. Contact 2W, an Axcient partner, today for help with your backup and storage needs. 2W Tech is a full-service IT Consulting firm that specializes in Security solutions.
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