Getting Started With a Backup Plan For Your Business

It goes without saying, but a friendly reminder never hurts:

Backup your data. Always. Then back it up again.

In a previous life, I worked in a Fortune 500 company's major global data center. Back up and data restore responsibilities fell onto my team's shoulders. It was not our primary responsbility, but it was a very consuming function, requiring at least one person devoted to just backups and restores for this one data center, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Business continuity was of paramount importance. This company had invested, literally, billions of dollars into data.

Now, your organization may not have billions of dollars worth of data, but that doesn't mean it's not the lifeblood of your business. When more and more of your organization's information is digital, a business continuity plan is a necessity, not a luxury. It's never been easier to manage backups and you don't even need someone on staff 24 hours a day!

Do You Currently Backup Your Data?

Well, if you're like all too many small to medium sized businesses, you probably don't back up your data at all. You can easily and quickly change this! Modern operating systems include a backup utility. Just purchase a portable external hard drive from Amazon (1 terabyte is probably a good starting size for a small business), connect it to your computer, and then using Configure Backup in Windows 10 or Time Machine in macOS, you can very easily schedule backups of all your important files! This is called Directly Attached Storage, or DAS, and with minimal effort and cost, you're actually ahead of the game!

Improving Your Backup Plan

Ok, so, you now regularly backup your data. Great! This will keep your business running if your computer fails. However, this method won't help you if a disaster strikes your office, and it's also not particularly secure.

For better business continuity, you can make two backups on portable hard drives, keep one at your office and then keep another in a fire/water proof safe elsewhere. These are called onsite and offsite backups respectively. Utilizing both is called a hybrid backup.

If you've gotten this far, you are on the road to serious business continuity, but there's still room for improvement. For example, you'll want to encrypt your portable hard drives for security. Both Windows and macOS offer tools within the operating system to do this; BitLocker in Windows and Disk Encrypt in macOS will help you encrypt your portable hard drives.

Now you have redundancy and you have security. Good work!

Leveraging the Cloud

For the absolute best backup plan, you will also want to back up to the cloud. If you've never really used cloud services, this might seem intimidating, but popular public services make this easy and very affordable. Here at A&A Office Systems, we use Ahsay to provide cloud backup solutions to our customers in our private data center.

A good cloud services partner can help you securely back up your data and help you restore your information in the event of a disaster. Cloud backups are the best way to affordably maintain consistent, automated offsite backups.

Scaling With Growth

Please keep in mind, the solutions outlined here are really just starting points for small to medium businesses. Because surveys suggest approximately half of businesses still don't backup their data at all, implementing even the smallest steps puts you on a positive path forward. But you'll want to contiously take steps to improve your plans, especially if your business grows to include more computers and/or employees.

Managing a DAS on every computer, while feasible for very small operations, will quickly become cumbersome with more users, so for your onsite backups you will want to consider perhaps a NAS device for backups. NAS stands for Network Attached Storage, which stands in contrast to Directly Attached Storage like the portable hard drive because it doesn't connect directly to your computer and instead, resides elsewhere on your organization's network. Even a simple PC or server with ample hard drive space on your network will make your life a lot easier! Additional software can automate your backups so you never miss a beat.

As for your offsite backups, your organization may grow so large that you consider costly offline storage media such as high capacity tape cartridges or Blu Ray discs, but until then, cloud backups are the best bang for your buck. Working with a good cloud service provider (such as A&A!) can help ensure you get the best value and experience, no matter the size of your business.

Is All This Really Necessary?

It goes without saying, but a friendly reminder never hurts:

Backup your data. Always. Then back it up again.

The truth is, you may never need to restore your data from a backup. But all it takes is one natural disaster, one computer crash, one theft, one cyber attack to bring your organization to a grinding halt. To completely wipe out your livelihood. To lose the trust of your customers. With the affordability and ease of modern backup solutions, it's simply not worth the risk.

We hope the suggestions here got you thinking about small ways to improve your backup policy! For more IT tips, contact A&A!