No matter whether you hold some crucial business document files on your drives or a piled-up stock of your favourite videos — all your data is important. However, there are a lot of causes for data loss, physical hard drives will always break sooner or later, and companies such as Backblaze report a 1.8% annualized failure rate of the hard drives they use. Alternatively, for cloud storage, there may be a failure on the service providers end, you might get hacked, or may be someone just accidentally deletes a large chunk of data.
Backing up your data regularly is the only way to keep it secure. Yet, in case you lose all of it, backups can be your ultimate saviour. More so, here are a few tips that can assist you in keeping your data backed up. You can also consider these while choosing an ideal backup solution so that your data can be safe throughout.
Backup your data frequently
Regular backups are essential if you want to minimise data loss, many applications offer schedule account-level backups and there are normally plenty of options for either incremental backups or the option to delete older backups after a certain time.
You will need to work out how frequently your data is updated to determine how often your data is backed up. Besides this, some of your critical data might need continuous backups, while some may only require daily or weekly backups. Thus, consider choosing an ideal backup solution as per your requirements.
Encrypt and protect your backups
Backing up your data in remote storage is one of the most convenient ways to move your data off-site to a secure location. However, while the data may be physically secure it is not necessarily protected from hackers or accidental data breaches. In general, you should always back up your data, though what you are storing can make some encrypted backups more important than others.
Encryption includes the use of an algorithm to encode specific documents or files — that can only be decoded by a particular person or group. Hence, besides security, it also ensures that all your data is the same as you want it to be in the case you need to recover it.
Evaluate the retention period
Each storage device comes with limited space. Therefore, storing every backup forever isn't quite possible. Most of the backup solutions come with a sequence of retention spans. This includes keeping daily backups for weeks, weekly backups for months, and even monthly backups for years.
This specific retention schedule allows for recovering multiple, primary backups. Therefore, it is advised to retain specific backup solutions considering your business's requirements for backup retention.
Many solutions offer incremental backups too, this only backup up new data or changed data, this, therefore, saves considerable amounts of storage space and reduces the time it takes to backup.
3-2-1 Backup Rule using off-site storage
While any backup is better than no backup if you have data that is very important or irreplaceable, the best solution is to employ the 3-2-1 backup rule.
This rule means you have 3 copies of your data (1 primary copy and 2 backups). You will then have two local copies, one being the primary then a local backup to network-attached storage or even just an external hard drive, then an offsite backup. You could have a physical copy offsite where you manually bring a drive to and from work, but the most logical solution is to use one of the many affordable cloud backup solutions. Synology also has options allowing you to sync NAS drives over the internet.
Different backup solutions come with their varied specifications to handle and store your data. Thus, using multiple backup solutions stands as the most feasible option to ensure the security of your data. Liquid Web and cPanel are some of the best backup software — where the former makes backups of your device and store it in an off-site location. Alongside, the latter only obtain copies of your cPanel account that can be stored on-site or on the remote storage.