Backing up your Business – A Guide to Best Practises
The statistics on the rise of cyber-crime and data loss are terrifying. How much would a loss of your important company records damage your business?
Chances are, you’ve experienced some level of data loss in your lifetime. Whether it was accidental or a result of malicious behaviour.
But here’s the thing:
That loss of your business or personal data no longer needs to be a concern the conscious owner. There are multiple ways even the least tech savvy user is able to protect themselves and below we’ve dived into the best practices when it comes to business backup (we’ve even provided some handy and easy-to-use solutions).
Ensuring your important files are securely stored
First things first, it isn’t hard to see that the most important thing to your business is your company’s records. Weather they are your customer billing history and details or important documents and contracts used in day-to-day situations.
For this you should always consider a multiple backup solution. The best way to ensure that you do not lose important documents is to not rely solely on one backup method. Be sure to store your backup copies on two or more of the methods listed below;
USB/Flash Drive
We all seem to have a never-ending collection of these small, portable storage devices around our office (although not usually when you need one). In the past, these have proven great for storing and transferring important files or documents from one device to another. For users only looking to back up a finite amount of files this proves to be a simple and quick solution, it is however not without its drawbacks and we recommend that this is not your only backup solution.
External Hard Drive
This is without a doubt, one of the most popular backup solutions. A portable hard drive which allows you to backup and store large amounts of files and documents. Much like the flash drive option, the hard drive is connected to your computer (typically via USB port). The key benefits an external hard drive has over a flash drive is the total size and performance available.
It is important to note that both a flash drive and external hard drive have been known to fail at any time without warning (Trust me, I’ve learnt this the hard way).
Cloud Backup
Who are we kidding? Being a Cloud Solutions Provider, we are naturally bias towards a Cloud backup solution but when looking for the best way to secure your devices backups it really is hard to walk past such valuable option. When backing up your device in the cloud it’s a simple task to select the specific files you would like to upload or even sync the entire device so that in the event that your computer crashes, all is not lost.
Cloud backup solutions are often stored in secure locations with a high level of encryption to ensure the protection of for data. Take our Cloud Backup service, we store all your backups in the secure NSW Government Data Centre right here in Sydney – Imagine boasting that to your colleagues!
Here’s some further information on Australia’s fastest and most secure Cloud Backup.
Protect yourself and your clients with Email Backup
It is safe to say that we are all guilty of losing or deleting important emails only to find that we are unable to recover them easily or even in some cases not at all.
Many believe this is the responsibility of the email provider to ensure that this data is backed up and your right, in most cases it is but here are some further thoughts to consider;
- How long is their data retention period? If you lost the email some time ago it may not be possible for the company to recover it. Many providers only allow for a retention period of a few days.
- Many providers have tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of mailboxes hosted. Your mailbox is best represented by that preverbal needle in the haystack resulting is a great level of difficulty to track it down to restore. Often resulting in time and professional service fees.
- The primary intent of the provider’s backup is to ensure that if the platform or service was to go down, they would be able to restore it for their customers and not intended to search for individual emails – many providers even state in their terms and conditions that there is no guarantee that all your data is recoverable.
This is why a rock solid, secure, email backup or archiving service is so important to your business. Having the ability to search and restore emails quickly and easily when needed is an invaluable feature.
Check out what email backup options we have available.
Don’t forget about your Website & Database
It’s true what they say; “Life is like a box of chocolates, your never know what you’re going to get”. Well if you’re a small business owner with a website, chances are you’re going to get hacked — at least once during your time of operation. It’s a harsh truth but a truth none the less.
The common misconception is that small business websites are “too small to be hacked”, whereas is reality being “too small” makes you the perfect target (All the big guys have their website under lock and key with a secure backup in place).
There are a number of different ways to ensure you have a backup of your site to revert back to when needed;
- Ask you developer for a copy of your website and database files and be sure to store these in a secure and easy to find location.
- The best solution is a cloud based backup of your site (we offer a great tool that does this daily!). This will allow you to roll back to a previous version of your site from before it was damaged – also great for business owners who manage their own websites and perform their own updates as this acts as a quick and easy solution if a mistake is made.
