A good and complete backup of your computer systems is your first line of defense against data loss. Backups provide a defense from disasters of all types because you have a way to restore your data. Whether you administer your backups internally or hire a managed services company to manage for you, it is important to understand your options.

A backup strategy has to be robust enough to recover from disaster, but simple enough to give a reliable restoration from a known point-in-time. Protecting critical data is part of your business continuity plan. Simply put, your business continuity plan is how you would operate your business in the short and long term in the event of a disruption or disaster.

Here is our 3-2-1 strategy.  For the full article, please go to the LAN Systems Blog.

3: Keep three copies of critical data. Be sure to have three unique copies of any data that you want to protect stored in three different places, including bare metal images, databases or files of any type. Having your data stored in multiple locations is important because it lessens the risk that a disaster would destroy more than one copy of your data. For instance, the local storage on an internal hard drive, external disk, NAS, tape, DVD, flash drive and Cloud can all count toward your three copies. Preferably, store external disks or tapes offsite in a fire-proof location. Cloud backup has built in redundancy by the provider but should only be counted as one of your three copies. It is important that the data is under your control and easily accessible.

2: Have your data on two types of media. Today, this primarily means on media in two different locations. Because disks are so reliable and economical, they are the most common type of media used for small business backup. Even though tape backups are no longer used as widely in small business, it still has popularity in large environments. If you are backing up to the Cloud, it is likely to be saved to disk with tape archiving.

1: One copy must be offsite and offline. This is the critical copy that can be used to restore your system in case of a disaster where your IT resources are seriously compromised or destroyed. A tape or disk backup that's offsite at a remote location will meet this criteria. But remote, cloud-based backup will not, unless it is also an offline copy.

Missing from the steps is one specifically for verification. Testing your backup might be implied in the rule but I like to add a zero so there is no question that the backup will be tested.

Contact me for a free roadmap that you can use to evaluate or create a backup strategy for your company.