Is Your Backup Fit for Purpose?

Data is one of the most valuable assets an organisation will possess and keeping it safe could be critical to the survival of your organisation. For this reason, it is vital that data is backed up with a reliable, comprehensive backup procedure.

  • Be in control of your data  Backing up your data is just one part of protecting your business critical information. Being able to recover and then restore it in seconds, in the event of a loss or disaster, can be anything from convenient to saving the life of your organisation.
  • The benefits  It is important to ensure the backup you have is actually successful for its intended purpose. Backups should be periodically tested to ensure their success. There is nothing worse than attempting to do a recovery on a computer only to find out your backup is somehow defective. You can test your backup by actually simulating a recovery. Make sure you know what the steps to recovery are, and that the backup will work effectively. Don’t just do this once and forget about it. Do the testing on a regularly scheduled basis.
  • Don’t wait until it is too late  Independent research has suggested that many organisations thought they had effective backup solutions but in reality did not. Unfortunately, in these cases it was only when people needed to restore data that they realised this. Don’t let this be you!
  • File syncing is not the same as backup  An increasing number of people are embracing ‘the cloud’ to store their files, whether this is Dropbox, Onedrive, Google Drive, SkyDrive, Amazon Cloud or any of the other file syncing services out there.
     
    Notice the use of the words ‘file syncing services’ and not ‘cloud backup services’. File syncing services have a lot of value and are very handy. However, file syncing services are not backup. Separate backup routines should be run to back up data and ensure it is safe.
     
    A good backup service will enable you to keep copies of your data covering a period of time – usually months. This will enable you to restore a single document or an entire database that was backed up months before an issue arises. File syncing does not offer this.

Further Details
 
If you would like additional information about backups and how to evaluate your current backup system, please contact Vantage IT.