What is the Best Way to Back up?

What is the Best Way to Back up?

“That will never happen to me.” We get through our lives telling ourselves the worst will not happen to us. It is the same with business: “We won’t need this data backup.” Yet, whatever your industry, secure, reliable backup ensures business as usual. So, what is the best way to back up? Here’s help.

Why You Need to Backup

Business disruptions of any kind can be costly. The disaster might take one of several shapes:

• Natural (e.g., wildfires, floods, earthquakes, or hurricanes)
• On-site (e.g., hardware/software failure, power outage, inability to access building)
• Employee driven (e.g., damaging mistakes or intentional sabotage by a disgruntled employee)
• Cyber-attack (e.g., data breach, ransomware, or distributed denial of service attack).  

Regardless, the best backup solution can help reduce downtime and damage.

Plan B: Approaches to Backup

There are several off-the-shelf backup options your business can use. Let us consider the pros and cons of the most popular ones.  

USB Thumb Drives — Also known as “flash drives,” “pen drives,” or “memory sticks.” These thumb-sized devices are compact and portable. But they have size limitations compared to hard drives. Also, mobility makes them easy to lose (which can set the disaster scenario in motion).  

A USB thumb drive is strong when not plugged in, but more vulnerable when it is. If someone snaps the drive or employs too much force, they can put the data on that backup at risk.

The cheap ones also tend to be slow, which can make backing up sluggish.

USB Hard Drives — Portable hard drives increase the data storage available, often at a decent price. They are compact and mobile. You can depend on strength, processing speed, storage volumes and more.

Hard drives are just as likely to get damaged as a thumb drive. The only difference is that if knocked or jostled, the cables are flexible. Still, a hard drive can be prone to physical failure. Selecting an external solid slate drive (SSD) can help since it has no moving parts. Information is in microchips instead of mechanical components.

Cloud Storage — Backing up to the cloud stores data on an external, secure server. If thieves take your computers and USB backup, you can still access your data on the cloud. Cloud storage providers build in redundancy to ensure your backup is still safe.  

Most cloud storage services back up to secure centers. With thousands of servers storing data. Oh, and they will have their own server backups too, in case they are the ones hit by a disaster. The providers also encrypt data during transit to further ensure compliance and security.

Migrating to a third-party cloud storage service. It will cut down the clutter on your premises. You can count on expert help to ensure security and compliance. Plus, you can cut operational costs. By offloading in-house storage or external hard drive expenses.

OK, what is the Best Answer?

Do not think disaster will not strike your business. Research has found data loss and downtime are most often caused by:

• Hardware failures (45% of total unplanned downtime)
• Loss of power (35%)
• Software failure (34%)
• Data corruption (24%)
• External security breaches (23%)
• Accidental user error (20%).

We recommend the 3-2-1 backup strategy. This means having 3 copies of your data. Two (2) of these would be on different devices (e.g., on your computer and on a backup drive). The other remaining backup copy (1) would be offsite, in the cloud.

Want to secure your data from the worst? Give us a call at (877) 686-6642 to set this up.

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