Effective Back-Ups
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Effective Back-Ups
What Are The Best Ways To Back Up Your Company’s Data?
Your organization can lose data at any point and if you’re not backing up your computer regularly. Your company computer’s hard drive could fail without warning, a bug could delete your important files or ransomware could hold your data hostage.
With backups, you have some peace of mind knowing your sensitive data is protected. However, if you’re looking for ways to secure your company’s data, then we’ve put this comprehensive guide together for you.
Why Having A Data Backup Is Essential?
Losing your customers’ data has a significant impact on your credibility. Even if your company manages to survive a data loss, it could be costly. The solution is to create and implement an effective backup strategy. With the right tools, planning, and training, you can protect your data. Below are some of the reasons why data backup is an essential component for your business.
- Prevent human error: Employee can make an error leading to massive data loss. While an employee can take keen measures to avoid errors, they still can omit some procedures that could lead to data loss. A backup and recovery plan ensures the human error doesn’t pose a threat to your business continuity.
- Provide Peace of Mind: If a virus starts damaging your network, failure to restore your system using a clean backup can leave you with network interruptions that can last days or longer, destroying customer confidence in the process. Backups allow you to focus on what delivers value to your business instead of always looking over your network security disaster.
- Protect your business: Data loss is costly and risky. Since data is an integral component of the day-to-day operations of any business, it is vital to take careful steps to guarantee the data you store and ensure they are always available to your business. Backups can help you restore computer devices during the process of disaster recovery as well as restore data after files have undergone deletion or damage.
- Prevents organization downtime: Downtime is inevitable when you lose data. This translates to production stoppages and unavailable services to clients. In this type of situation, your business will be forced to do whatever it can to recover lost data. You’re likely to do all you can to restore services, including starting all over again from scratch without a data backup in place.
Ways To Back Up Your Company’s Data
There are so many ways to back up your company data, from backing up those files on a remote server over the Internet to using an external drive. Your choice depends on several factors, like the size of the backup, portability and security requirements, setup complexity, budget, offsite, or onsite backup. Below are a few of them.
- External Hard Drives
External drives are common storage mediums. They are relatively cheap, easy to set up, provide multiple storage size options, and are usually large enough to store a lot of data. However, they are prone to failure like the hard drives in your computer, risk being damaged (when dropped) or misplaced (lost), and may run out of storage space as their size is fixed.
- Network Attached Storage (NAS)
Consider backing up your sensitive data on a NAS drive if you want to keep complete control of your data in the most reliable way. NAS drive appears like any other drive on your computer once you’ve got the device setup. The drive offers better data redundancy, performance using RAID configurations, and drive failure protection in real-time. However, NAS drive isn’t perfect even though they have fewer downsides than the external drives. One failed drive could lead to complete data loss depending on which RAID configuration you use.
- Cloud Backup
The latest trend in backup technology is storing your data in the cloud. When you store your data on the cloud, you can access it on any Internet-connected device. Your data are safe from disasters because cloud storage is offsite. There are plenty of cloud services available, which include Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud, and Dropbox. All these services can be used for backing up your folders and files. They will keep your data synced and encrypted with your locally saved copies.
When Should Backups Occur?
Anyone who relies on a computing device for personal use or business should have a daily backup plan in place to protect that data in case of loss. Daily backups are considered “current” and will involve the least amount of recovery.
Some professions are legally required to make regular backups of their data and keep that data stored encrypted for a length of time due to regulations or to add increased protection to their data. Depending on your field of work, rules are more stringent than others, requiring specific certifications to be held before utilizing backup services.
Do I Need Multiple Backups?
It’s a good idea to back up your data in more than one place. Having cloud storage can be an effective solution if you’re looking for online backup. However, you can store data in a removable device such as external hard drive if you want to easily access your files when you don’t have an Internet connection.
Think of data backup as one of those better-safe-than-sorry precautions. Therefore, it’s never a bad idea to take precautions back up multiple times should the unthinkable happen. In our opinion, the perfect combination is to use an external hard drive and subscribe to a cloud-based service.
Conclusion
An effective backup can make a big difference in your business. Don’t wait until a disaster happens and live to regret it when your data are lost. Setting up an automated backup only takes a few minutes. Once the backup is done, you’ll have peace of mind that your data is safe. However, if you want secure and comprehensive backup support, Precision IT Consulting has the track record and experience providing managed IT service support to businesses.
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