How to Backup Like a Pro

Backups are the most important part of a company’s information technology strategy. Restoring deleted or damaged files or emails is one of the tasks managed IT support providers do the most for their clients. It is sometimes so easy for your provider to restore these files, that it seems like anyone can do it at any time. There are a lot of different things in place, though, to be able to provide this service.

The backup strategy for your servers could also, and SHOULD also be implemented for your computers, laptops, and phones. There is no reason for anyone to lose data these days. With even just a little bit of forethought and planning, you never have to lose data again.

Backup often

There is nothing like the feeling you get when you have been working on a document all day long, and then something happens and suddenly the entire thing is GONE. Frequent backups can get you close to where you were before it vanished. If you made changes to a document all day long, but your most recent backup was only last night, those changes will still be gone. If your backups run on a regular basis, say every hour, you only run the risk of losing the last hour of work in the worst case scenario. Any plan you put in place should allow for backups to occur not only every evening but often throughout the day.

Backup to different locations

Any type of hardware can fail. Any service can go out of business. Any building could suddenly be destroyed by a natural disaster. Limiting your backups to one type or one location is extremely unwise. Especially when it comes to backing up a PC, someone will run a backup to an external hard drive and think they are good. The problem is that external hard drives fail frequently. Someday in the future, you may look to that hard drive to pull an archived file from or restore the backup of something. You plug in the external hard drive, and it won’t load up. All of that careful planning and backing up, gone. The best thing to do is to not only backup to an external hard drive, but also to a cloud service. You can also backup to 2 different external hard drives. Either method, just make sure you aren’t relying on a single backup. Redundancy is key when creating a good backup system.

Use the cloud

As mentioned previously, the cloud is a great location to keep a secondary, or primary backup. You can also utilize cloud services for access to your data. Falling under this category would be items such as your contacts, your email, your to-do list, etc. I’m sure you’ve seen the social media posts from friends saying their phone is lost or broken, and therefore they have lost all of their contacts. There is absolutely no excuse for this anymore. You can store contacts through the same service you have your email through. If you have multiple email accounts, you can store your contacts with the appropriate address, so personal contacts are stored with your personal email address, and business contacts are stored with your work account.

Not only are there specific applications that will store your data in the cloud like those mentioned above and file storage services, there are cloud backup services. Having one of your backup locations in the cloud is a great practice since it will protect you from natural disasters that could destroy the device and the backup at the same time.

Check your backups

A backup is only good if it is actually working. For example, I know of a company that had backups scheduled to run daily. Little did they know, the backups hadn’t actually run for the last 6 months. There was a major failure on their main file server, and since they hadn’t been checking the backups, all of that data for the last 6 months was gone. They had to take the server to a data recovery center and paid $11,000 to restore the data. This was a very costly mistake for the company, that could have been easily avoided. I wouldn’t trust that the system told you the backup ran successfully. Once a month, attempt to restore something to make sure the backups were actually successful. I would hate to see another company suffer the consequences of not verifying the backups are running properly.

While data recovery can be simple, there has to be data to recover. Following these rules, you will always have data available to be recovered.