Passed largely unnoticed by lots of people with more important things to worry about yesterday was #WorldBackupday.
It was started in March 2011 not by a large corporate selling backup systems but by Adam Jefferson from Leeds. He started a post on reddit on how he had lost three years’ worth of information because he had not backed up a laptop that had just died. He proposed 31st March as a day to focus people’s attention on making sure that they had good backups of their treasured data.
So let’s keep it simple in this difficult time and just a few pointers on backup. Again if you need any help ensuring that your backup is working please contact me I am happy to help you out free of charge.
1. Your backup is only as good as your last restore
When did you check that your backup is actually working by restoring it? So many firms set and forget the backup. Things change, data moves and often it is not included. So do it today, check with your IT Guy is the backup working and when did you last test a restore?
2. Automate, Automate, Automate
Most backup errors are caused by humans, or lack of automation people forget to change tapes, particularly if they are not in the office, don’t reschedule failed jobs, or don’t capture all of the data they should. As part of your GDPR processes you should have a list of all of the data you hold can you cross reference this to your backup selections. Regular and automated verification of your backup prevents this problem from happening.
3. Backup is not Archive
Lots of firms reuse the same tapes or cartridges again and again overwriting sometimes within a one week. Backup is not archive it is just a copy of the data that is on your system at the time. If you are overwriting tapes you are not properly archiving your data. How can you pull some data backup from last year’s job, when the data was inadvertently deleted months ago and you only noticed a year later. You need to have a proper backup and archive system to ensure that you are compliant.
What backup system should I use?
The choice is endless but most firms have a mixture of systems. Traditional tape is out for most firms as the amount of data is too large to cope with a daily backup. Others use USB drives or Network attached storage that then pushes data to a Cloud based system as an offsite location. There is no right choice as the type and amount of data each firm is storing is different. However some basic recommendations to get started.
Acronis Cyber Backup Cloud.
This has moved on significantly in the last few years an by far the market leader and my favourite is Acronis. Their Cyber Backup Cloud product allows you to backup up data from any number of different locations. Such as your on premise server and applications, but also to include your Office 365 data, Website, and even Cloud Virtual Servers. This backup data can be located on your data centre, or a public cloud like Amazon Webservices, Azure or Google Cloud. This flexibility gives you a single portal to look at all of your backup sources which makes if hugely simpler to install and manage.
If you would like some advice concerning the most appropriate backup system for your firm please get in touch David.Watson@anshin.co.uk
Comments