When you arrive back at the office, firefighters are hosing down the last of the flames and you’re dialing your insurers. It’s not a disaster, but your server room is toast. With a few days of clean-up, some new kit, and air freshener and all will be shipshape again, ready to restore everything from your backup.
...You are all backed up… Right?
Fire, theft, accidental file deletion, or disgruntled employees… there are lots of reasons why you might need to rely on your backup system.
But the most likely reason by far is that your business becomes the victim of a cybercrime. There are countless forms of criminal attack, many of them designed to steal your data and either encrypt it or deny you access to it until you pay a ransom.
This kind of crime doesn’t have to trigger a full-scale disaster, but it’s a fact that most small businesses that are hit with a full-on cyberattack don’t recover from it. For all these reasons, backing up your data is one of the strongest precautions you can take. Set it up properly and make it part of your routine to check that it’s working. Because one day your backup could save your business.
This is a physical device that includes pre-installed backup software and storage, and usually comes with all components integrated. That makes it easy to set up and configure. You can access it through its own interface on your computer.
Keep in mind that if this type of appliance fails, you lose your entire backup solution. Even if you have a secondary backup, you need to replace your hardware appliance before you can access data – which increases recovery time.
These are installed on your existing system and allow you to back up to a destination within your current network (although it’s often best to have a dedicated backup server).
You’ll need to install and configure the operating software, but compared to hardware appliances, software solutions give you greater flexibility. They can also be less expensive.
Perhaps the simplest solution, cloud services - also known as Backup as a Service (BaaS) - let you run your backup directly from the cloud. You need to install some software on your local devices but you don't need additional servers or systems. It also makes it simple to scale up the storage you need as your business grows.
It's become common to combine local with cloud backups, creating a very robust hybrid solution. It brings together the best of both worlds, which makes it a popular choice.
A hybrid solution is one good option that also follows the strong industry-accepted 3-2-1 approach.
This makes a copy of everything you want to protect. The first time you perform a backup you'll want to do a full backup which can take many hours.
Once you've completed a full backup for the first time, you may switch to a differential backup. This only backs up files that have changed since the last full backup. These are faster because less data is being copied, however the amount of data grows with each differential backup until the next full backup.
Again, these only copy changed data, but they copy what's changed since the last incremental or full backup. These are much smaller and faster because new data is being copied over daily. The less time between backups, the smaller the amount of data to be backed up. With more sophisticated software you can back up every hour. - or even more often.
On the downside, this type of backup may take longer to restore because the data has to be assembled from the last full backup and every incremental backup since then.
If you have the storage capacity, you could back up individual machines to local disks, or to an external USB drive.
It's fast and you don't need a network. However, if your device was damaged - in a fire, for example - your backup could well be destroyed alongside it. It may also mean that you have to manage your backups device-by-device which is inconvenient, especially in bigger companies.
NAS (Network Attached Storage) SAN ( Storage Area Network), or even just a simple folder on your network, lets you store all your company backups in one place, and restore whatever you need, when you need it. However, as with local disks, if you suffer a major disaster your backup may be lost too.
If you're concerned about fire, flood, or equipment theft, a sensible solution is to have a backup stored off-site - ideally 100+ miles away from your data center.
A traditional way of doing this is to copy data onto tapes and physically ship them to a distant location. Modern tape technology stores a large amount of compressed data.
This may not feel very 21st century, but tapes are a robust way of storing and archiving data for a long time - 30 years or more. As you can imagine, though, recovery could take time. You can restore entire systems this way, but it's impractical for single files.
A fast internet connection allows you to send your backup files to the cloud. You subscribe to the storage capacity you need and can easily add more without having to invest in hardware. To avoid issues with uploading large volumes of data, cloud storage suppliers may also offer physical data shipping or one-off initial 'seeding' systems which avoid a massive first upload.
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