Backups- What's the basics I need to know?

We all know the standard line of questioning we receive from an IT professional, or maybe even a family friend, as we run in a panic scrambling to save whatever data still remains after a hard drive failure or accidental deletion.

Then we’re met with that dreadful sinking feeling as we realise the external hard drive has failed as well, or our data isn’t as up to date as it should be.

We’ve all been there, personally for me I’ve been there a few times before I entered IT as an occupation.

The aim of this article is to educate and inform so you never have to experience this again.

3-2-1 A time honoured tradition- for a reason

When planning your backups or, discussing them with your IT support company, you should always follow the 3-2-1 rule. This infographic outlines it perfectly:

You should keep constant and regular backups of your live/production data. This is your first line of defence.

Backup 3 – External Hard Drive

If you have a failure (and you need to restore quickly!) you can do so from this type of backup media there and then, without an internet connection.

Backup 2 – NAS, file server or SAN

You should have another set of your data backed up on a storage server or NAS which is also easily accessible in case your external hard drive fails and you need to perform a restore from another device on your network.

Backup 1 – Offsite

If a pipe bursts and your server room floods with water or if the building burns down the last thing you want to think of is the state of your business data. Having a regular offsite backup means that even if this happens you can restore to all new hardware, the restore will likely take longer but will be the fastest way to get you back to where you were.

Checking your backups

Well done! You’ve got backup solutions in place that adhere to the 3-2-1 rule, but when did you last check it?

Most of us have fallen into this trap at some point or another and you hear about it in the news all the time where a big organisation is attacked and their backups were not reliable enough to restore from.

You should be regularly checking your backups to ensure their integrity. If you do not manage your backups you should ask you IT support company whether they are testing backups in the following ways:

If your backup is purely data-

• Check the integrity of this data regularly; can you open and edit the data from the backup location or do you get errors when trying to do so.
• Test a restore of that data to a location outside of your live environment and make sure you can access the data reliably and that it is intact.

If your backup is a whole machine/an image of a machine–

• Try and boot this image in a virtual environment – Does it work reliably? Can you run it for many hours without issues?
• Boot the image both locally and in the cloud so if you were in a disaster situation you know this would work.

How long until it’s data hoarding? Backup retention

How many historical backups you keep is all down to the use case. You should ask yourself the following questions to work out how you want to handle backup retention:

• If you lost everything tomorrow and had to restore from a backup, would you need all of your historical data (since operations began), or would a year, month, week or day suffice?
• Are there going to be situations where you may need to retrieve a specific file or piece of data, how far back would this be and how regularly would this happen?

You should set the retention to however long you responded to these questions with, and if you answered two different periods of time for these questions it’s best to find a happy medium between the two.

Remember that if you decide to keep all data you will pay an increased cost to store the data as it grows. When evaluating costs to store your data ask yourself whether it would cost more to build that data up again from scratch or to have everything stored in case of an emergency situation.

I don’t have a backup solution, where do I start?

All good backup plans start with a conversation with whoever manages your IT. You ideally want to outline the points made in the 3-2-1 rule section of this post. If you’re completely new to this and need further advice, Corbel, as your local IT support experts to Ipswich, Felixstowe, Bury St Edmunds and the surrounding Suffolk area we are always happy to have this discussion with you as part of an initial consultation.

Back-up to the top?

So you’ve followed the tips in this article? Let’s replay the scenario from the beginning:

A lot less stressful isn’t? Hopefully this saves you having the hardship of suffering data loss due to bad backup procedures. It definitely has us and our customers!

Corbel are award winning IT Experts offering?IT Support ,?Cyber Security ?and?Workplace Recovery ?services to businesses across Suffolk. If you would like some further information on Backups or a free copy of our Disaster Recovery Plan template, get in touch and email [email protected] or give us a call on 01473 241515.