About 70% of businesses have (or will) experience a data loss incident. For those companies, a backup and recovery plan can be the difference between keeping their doors open or having to close down for good.

Business continuity is all about assessing and mitigating risks to your company’s well-being and ensuring survival in the face of a disastrous event, such as a data breach, flood, virus attack, or other major incident.

And many of those risks involve the loss of the data that you need to keep your business running.

60% of companies that suffer data loss shut down within 6 months of the incident.

Choosing the right business solutions means also finding the right tools for automated backup and recovery of your data should one of these main causes of data loss occur:

• RANSOMWARE
• HARDWARE/SYSTEM FAILURE
• HUMAN ERROR
• VIRUS/MALWARE
• POOR MOBILE DEVICE MANAGEMENT
• NATURAL OR MANMADE DISASTER

Data Backup and Recovery Best Practices

Backups are often one of those functions that we don’t think about much, until of course something happens, and we have to recover our data. A significant number of backups fail to properly recover 100% of the data a user thought was being backed up because they’ve been put on “auto pilot” and weren’t checked or managed.

Backup failure can occur due to a number of reasons, including running out of space, a software malfunction, or the backup being accidentally turned off.

When you’ve suffered a ransomware attack and are facing the prospect of paying thousand of dollars in ransom to get your files decrypted is not the time you want to find out your backup hasn’t been capturing your data properly.

Following these best practices can help you avoid backup nightmares and ensure you have a recoverable copy of your data whenever you need it.

BACK UP TO MORE THAN ONCE PLACE

If you have only one backup copying data from all your devices, you’re leaving yourself open to risk if something happens to it. For example, an external backup drive could become damaged or a cloud backup provider could have a server crash.

It’s smart to use more than one backup and recovery tool so you can lessen your risk of a backup failure that results in data loss.

HAVE A LEAST ONE CLOUD BACK UP

Many companies like to have complete control of their data, so they back up to a local server or external hard drive. That’s fine for ONE of your backup options, but you should also have an offsite cloud back up to protect your business continuity.

If anything happens to your physical office, such as a flood, fire, tornado, or theft, you could lose your computers and the local storage disk that you backed everything up on locally.

An offsite cloud backup ensures you can recover your data to any device from the cloud and keep your business running in the face of a catastrophe at your office.

MONITOR YOUR BACKUPS

You start your backup process, then forget about it until you need it, only to find out something has gone wrong. That’s unfortunately how backup failures go undetected and cause data loss when a business owner thought they had properly prepared.

You should regularly monitor all your device backups or subscribe to a managed backup plan from a trusted IT provide (like Unbound Digital) to ensure problems like a shortage of space or a stalled backup are addressed right away, and you’re not left with any devastating surprises.

MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE “RECOVERY” PART

Backup and recovery go hand-in-hand. Once your data is properly backed up on storage media, you want to be able to quickly restore that data back to a device in the same structure and format.

Not all backup solutions have fast or easy recovery options. You might also find some incompatibilities as well. For instance if you use an image backup designed to backup your entire OS, software, and files, if you try to restore that to a  computer with a different OS version, you may run into trouble.

Recovery is just as important as backing up and should be tested regularly. A good recovery tool can be the difference between being down for 2 hours and 2 weeks.

BACK UP YOUR CLOUD SERVICES

Are you backing up your Office 365 or Google G Suite data to a 3^rdparty cloud backup service? Most businesses don’t, and that’s a big mistake that could result in data loss.

Microsoft policies recommend that you backup your cloud data separately because they can’t guarantee that nothing would go wrong with their servers. You could also run into accidental or malicious file deletion by an employee that would result in data loss if you didn’t have your cloud service data backed up separately.

Need a Great Backup and Recovery Service?

Your backup and recovery plan is perhaps one of the most important parts of your technology infrastructure, don’t leave it to chance. Unbound Digital can help you with backup monitoring solutions that will ensure your data is safe and recoverable.

Contact us today to discuss your backup plan! Call 423-335-2461 or reach out online.