Imagine what would happen to your business if you lost company data like customer details, employee records, financial statements, and proprietary information. Such a scenario can tremendously hurt your operations. Your employees will find it difficult to properly serve your customers, who'll become irate and leave you for your competitor. You may miss tons of sales opportunities and incur massive financial losses. Worse, your company's reputation might take a huge hit, causing you to permanently lose your customers to your competitors.
Fortunately, having data backups can defend against data loss since it ensures that you’ll always have a copy of your important data. Here are some tips that’ll help you develop and maintain an effective backup strategy.
Related readin: 3 Reasons why your business should have a backup and disaster recovery plan
1. Ensure your data backup plan is comprehensive
In designing your company’s backup plan, make sure to answer the following questions:
- Which files need to be backed up? Which ones are crucial for your business to survive, operate, and thrive?
- How frequently do you need to back up your files?
- Where will your backups be stored?
- How will you integrate your backup solution into your existing IT systems and procedures?
- Who are the key persons involved in implementing your data backup strategy and what are their respective roles?
With all of these details laid out in your backup plan, you can rest easy knowing that it contains all the information needed to create an effective backup plan.
2. Follow the 3-2-1 backup rule
A widely regarded best practice, the 3-2-1 backup rule recommends that you:
- Keep three copies of your data (i.e., one primary and two backups).
- Back up data on two different types of media (e.g., disk, tape, or cloud).
- Have at least one backup stored off site (e.g., cloud or off-site data center).
For example, you can keep your primary data on your office computer, save a copy of that data on an external hard drive, and store another copy in the cloud.
By following the 3-2-1 backup rule, you can ensure that if you lose your primary data and one backup fails, you can still recover your data from another backup. So with the earlier example, if a natural disaster destroys copies of your data stored on your office computer and external hard drive, your cloud backup will remain unaffected and accessible.
Compared to other storage options in the market, the cloud is one of the most reliable. Top-notch cloud backup providers like Safebit leverage multiple off-site servers to create redundancies for their customers, with each server protected by multiple security measures like encryption and firewalls. Moreover, any data stored in the cloud is accessible from anywhere, anytime, using any internet-connected device, making it especially ideal for remote teams.
3. Test your data backup system regularly
Aside from saving copies of your data, your backup system should also quickly restore lost data. To avoid struggling with data recovery after a disaster, you must regularly test your backup system.
Testing lets you determine whether you are meeting your recovery point objective and recovery time objective, as well as your regulatory requirements. It also allows you to identify issues like misconfiguration and take the necessary corrective actions.
Make sure to test your backup system in these scenarios as well:
- Before and after a system upgrade or change
- After a power outage
- Before deploying a new system
You don’t always have to test restoring a whole environment since that can be time-consuming and disruptive. Instead, run a full test every month or week, and conduct more frequent smaller-scale tests for critical systems, applications, and data.
It’s not easy to maintain a reliable data backup system, so it’s best to let the IT experts at Safebit do it for you. We can help you develop an effective data backup strategy and system that’ll allow your business to quickly resume operations after any disaster. Schedule a FREE consultation with us today.
