Backup and Disaster Recovery in Bristol

Data is being generated everywhere within your business.  Emails, Teams messages, invoicing software, business critical software (databases, CRMs etc), servers, staff PCs and laptops.

A simple question to ask yourself is: “what data loss would cause me problems in my business?”  For some businesses that answer is a simple one – it is a shared folder.  For other businesses their data is dispersed over numerous devices and accounts and the loss of any part of it could cause pain and potential legal implications.

When considering what data needs to be backed up it is worth spending some time and thinking through each area as discussed in the data article as this will highlight the areas you need to focus on.

This is a simple question but one that has a rather complex answer.  It depends on your answers to questions such as:

• What sort of data are you backing up?
• What type of device needs backing up? (servers may need to be treated differently to laptops for example)
• How quickly do you need to recover your information? (Seconds, hours, days)
• What sort of disaster you are protecting your business from? (Fire and flood might be treated differently to cyber attack)
• Do you have an Internet connection capable of transmitting your daily information to a cloud backup?

As you can see there are numerous considerations when considering the type of backup you need for your business.  I have written a more in-depth article discussing the types of backup and which would be right for your business.

A hybrid backup uses a combination of onsite and offsite storage in order to give a greater degree of protection and recovery options.  The gold standard in backup and data recovery starts with ensuring you have 3 copies of your data:

• The live data.
• A backup of your live data stored locally.
• A third copy of your data stored in the cloud.

Although this doesn’t work for every business it does allow the greatest chance to recover and also allows the fastest recovery times.

In the article about protecting your data there is more information about how this is achieved in practice and the costs associated with this form of backup.

It is easy to panic when you mistakenly delete or cannot find a file that you have been working on, fortunately, our easy file recovery process means that most of the time these documents can be easily recovered.

The answer depends on how much data you produce as a business and how important it is to retain everything.

For many businesses backups are carried out overnight which utilises the Internet connection when it is not being used by your staff.  However, this method leaves your business with the potential to lose the entire day’s work if the failure occurs before the backup can occur.

An alternative is to backup multiple times per day and this can be done every time a file is changed.  This ensures all of your data is always secure but often requires either a dedicated Internet connection or a fast connection with spare bandwidth reserved for the backup process.

As with all cost based questions the answer depends on what you need to backup, how large it is, how long you want to keep it and many other factors.

However, the article on protecting your data tries to breakdown some of these costs to give you a range of prices that are realistic.

Not in the way most businesses assume. Microsoft keeps the Microsoft 365 service running and protects against failures on its side, but protecting your own data is your responsibility. Deleted emails and files are only kept for a limited time, typically between 14 and 93 days depending on the service, and anything that is encrypted by ransomware or overwritten will sync across your account just like any other change.

A separate backup of your email, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams data means you can restore it from any point in time, including data belonging to staff who have left. If Microsoft 365 holds most of your business data, it should be part of your backup strategy. Talk to us about including it in yours.

That depends on two things you decide in advance: how much data you can afford to lose, and how long you can afford to be without your systems. A business that backs up overnight could lose up to a day of work, while one that backs up throughout the day might lose minutes. Similarly, restoring a single file takes moments, but rebuilding a server after a fire or ransomware attack takes longer unless the recovery has been planned for.

We will help you set realistic targets for both and design your backup around them, so you know what to expect before anything goes wrong rather than finding out during it.