Backups - Should you backup your data?

Short answer, yes.

Most people that I ask or when the subject comes up don’t back up their data in any way. When everything is working normally then of course why would anyone worry? The problem lies when something goes wrong, or hardware fails, or power loss results in corruption. I could go on.

For how much we rely on our computers and the data they store we don’t always treat that data how it should be treated.

Ways to back up your data

Data backup can be as simple as making a copy of a file and storing it on a different internal or external hard drive. This method is the most basic backup possible and has its drawbacks but it is technically backing up your data.

The biggest drawback is that the additional drive can fail and that there is no redundancy. I’ve come across people who use this method and what I always ask is “well, what if that drive fails?”

Another way to back up data is through a service. To read more about cloud storage services refer to my previous post here.

With an online service you can back up your data to an external location automatically. If anything happens to your data locally you can retrieve your backup copy as long as you have an internet connection. The internet connection required can also be a drawback. If for whatever reason you don’t have access and need something. You can’t get it. Another drawback is that since your data is now stored on hosted servers, that service could undergo maintenance or have connectivity issues and you cannot access your data until the issues are resolved.

But - What’s the best way to backup my data?

To have redundancy as well as covering all your bases the best backup solution is both local storage and cloud.

What I always recommend is have a local backup copy with an internal or external hard drive, and then take that backup and copy it to a cloud service. This allows for redundancy and covers a lot of disaster scenarios.

With all the businesses we work with this is our standard for backing up data. We set up local jobs to maintain critical data and copy that data over to a secondary job that gets uploaded to our repositories at kbitdev. That way, the data that is crucial to running your business is always safe in the event of disaster.

Get in touch with us today if your business needs any help with backing up data. I’ve come across a decent amount of places that don’t have any form of backup and while that works fine when everything is working normally but if anything was to go wrong the business would be in jeopardy.

Shorter post this week but back up your data! In the modern world businesses are run on computers and without them most businesses would crumble.

Thanks for reading - M