It will take a few minutes to read and action this email and it might be the most important thing you do this year!
As a business we acquire, on average, five new clients per month. I continue to be amazed by how many of those clients have no (or inadequate) backups. Over the past six months, we found that a staggering 40% of our audits revealed that there was absolutely no working backup and 70% had a poor strategy. Almost none of them had even the most basic disaster recovery plan. So what constitutes a good backup?
Data should exist in three places.
In order to have confidence in your backup, the data should exist in three places.
The original working data set – the live data you’re changing on a day to day basis.
A local copy of that data backed up regularly.
A copy of the data OFF SITE.
Have a plan.
You should have a written plan of what to do if you lose data. You need to know quickly what action to take in three scenarios.
A member of staff overwrites or deletes a file. This is the simplest form of recovery and should take your provider less than ten minutes to recover the file.
A malicious attack such as ransomware. Your entire data set can be affected very quickly and you should have a recovery plan in place that includes initial measures to prevent the spread of infection and then safe, speedy recovery of files.
Total loss. You need a plan to recover from complete server failure or theft.
Backups should be monitored.
Your backup technology should be monitored and should raise an action if it fails. Most good backup technologies send an email alert if an issue occurs and the best ones are tightly integrated into your provider’s ticketing system.
Don’t let humans get involved.
If you are still using a backup method that involves USB hard disks or tapes you need to make changes. Humans are the most dangerous point failure to backup routines, so many times I’ve heard “Bob changes the backup disks but he’s been off this week”
Test, Test, Test.
Your IT provider should be testing your backup regularly and reporting to you. If you’re not confident there is a simple test. Create a file and allow the backup to run overnight, the next day, simply call your IT provider and ask them to recover the file.
Everything Tech offers a free of charge backup sanity check service. We will check and write a report on your backup and suitability.
Call us on 0161 452 3233 to take advantage.
Everything Tech provides IT Support in Manchester and the north west.
