Reliable Data Backups, A Must for Any Business

Making sure you have reliable data backups for your business doesn’t have to be difficult but does require some up front planning to ensure you can recover your data when you need it.  The first thing to keep in mind is why you’re backing up your data:

1. To ensure you can recover any data lost that is accidentally deleted or corrupted.  This is usually a small number of files, and your recovery process should be setup to have multiple backup copies if data corruption occurred some time ago and wasn’t discovered until very recently.  While it may be a small number of files, it maybe a large amount of data such as an e-mail archive.


2. To recover from a major incident such as a successful ransomware attack on your organization or a hardware failure that results in mass data loss.  Successful ransomware attacks are becoming more common, and you need to be prepared to recover large volumes of data to get your business up and running quickly.

So where do you start?

First, make sure you know where all your company data is stored so your backup software can back it up.  This should be on a company server but if there is data on the workstations in your company then you need to find a way to get it backed up.

Second, find an effective backup solution.  There are many cloud-based solutions available for a reasonable cost and these can be very effective for businesses where the volume of data that changes each day is minimal.  If your business has large amounts of data updated daily, then you will need a very fast internet connection without data bandwidth limits to support your backups.  For cloud-based solutions, you should ask where the backup data is kept; I would recommend your backup data be kept in Canada.  If you prefer an onsite solution, make sure the backups are in a secure area and you take backup media off-site at least each week.  This will ensure that an on-site event such as a fire or break-in doesn’t result in the loss of your data and your data backups.

Third, determine the frequency of backups and the data retention periods.   A daily backup that runs at night after the end of your business day is best.  Regarding retention periods, the more backup copies you keep, the better protected you are but the more you will pay in data storage costs.  At a minimum, I suggest you have:

• All daily backups from the past 2 weeks
• One weekly backup from 4 weeks prior to that
• A monthly backup for the past 12 months
• A year end backup for at least the last 7 years

Lastly, have a plan to test your backups each week by restoring some data. This serves two purposes:

1. It verifies the integrity of your data backup.
2. When the time comes and you must restore data, you’ll know what you’re doing.