Backup Disaster Recovery

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 great 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 loose 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.