The Importance of Data Backup
Why Data Backup is Important
Ask yourself, if you lost extremely important data today, how would you react? It would be perfectly understandable to panic. The data on your computer or server is often irreplaceable. Whether it is something as simple as family photos, or the entire client base and financial data for your business. Whatever the case, data lost to drive failure or the unexpected can be costly. If a business experiences a drive failure or ransomware that affects files critical to its operation, often it is impossible to recover data. When data recovery is possible larger drives can cost upwards of five thousand dollars. Plus, there is a chance that that data cannot be recovered at all. With a proper backup such a situation could be dealt with in a day or less with virtually zero data loss. No matter the quality of the computer hardware, or the security in your business unexpected things happen. Sometimes, warning signs become apparent before complete failure, and you can react, often enough though, complete drive failure can occur without warning. Ransomware often strikes without warning and commonly results in complete data loss even if you pay the ransom!
Deciding what to Back Up
The first step to backing up your files is to decide what files are important to you. Whether that be critical business data, or just photos, emails, and old word documents. Critical business data is often stored on a server. Often it is important to back up the entire server. The same goes for proprietary software on business workstations. Often the best policy is to take an image backup of the whole workstation. Personal data and simple file backups such as word documents can be handled in a simpler and less expensive way.
How to Back Up Your Data
Backing up your data is not difficult, and there are many options to do so. Particularly considering the ever-decreasing costs of physical and cloud storage. It is recommended that businesses backing up critical data consult a professional for the best backup solution.
Cloud storage is a great way to backup critical data, since the data is off site, and in the event of a catastrophic event where even your backups are destroyed. Often data stored in the cloud is very safe and can tolerate a loss of a hard drive or a data center outage.
NAS (Network Attached Storage) Backup Network attached storage is a great way to back things up both at the office and at the house. Network attached storage is basically a very simple file server which can be used for backup. The level of backup involves the type of software used and can range from just simply backing up files to taking an image of critical business data. Most Network Attached Storage devices also support redundant hard drives so that in the event of a failure no data is lost.
Disaster Recovery (DRAAS) This is the recommended choice for all businesses. Disaster recovery allows for full backups of servers and workstations and is best suited for the mission critical business data. Often DRAAS solutions include backup to both a NAS and the cloud. This means that even if the business literally burns down, no data is lost. DRAAS can also provide very quick restores, or in mission critical operations quick failover to a different server. During a server failure it can be possible to cut over to a replica (copy of the server) in a matter of minutes or a restore onto a new server in a matter of hours. This makes a huge difference when a server failure can mean $10,000s of dollars per hour in lost business revenue.
Above all, Backups are Critical for your Business
If your data is backed up, you can rest easy that critical files will not be lost out of the blue. The best policy to be safe is to backup often and to backup correctly. If you are diligent in backing up your data, you can avoid devastating and costly failures.