Back up advice

The 31st March marks #worldbackupday. Here are a few quick tips to help keep your business and your own personal data secure.

All businesses, regardless of size, should take regular backups of their important data, and make sure that these backups are recent and can be restored.

By doing this, you're ensuring your business can still function following the impact of flood, fire, physical damage or theft.

Furthermore, these backups should be recent and tested to ensure the data can be restored. As they say, “you haven’t backed anything up unless you can restore it”.

The key steps to ensuring a robust backup strategy are:

• Identify what data you need to backup and how much. This would be essential data you could not function without. Examples of this would be documents, pictures, emails, calendars.

• Consider how quickly you need to be able to access the data after an incident.

• Regularly test your backups to make sure this target is achievable and realistic.

• The 3-2-1 Rule involves keeping 3 copies of your data, storing 2 backup copies on different storage media with 1 of them located offsite.

• Make backing up your data a regular scheduled task. Nowadays, most network and cloud backup solutions will allow you to schedule your backups. If you require to do this task manually, schedule a regular time to run the process.

• Periodically, restore your data to ensure that essential data is being fully and accurately preserved.

#backup #backupstrategy #cyber #cyberadvice #infosec #smallbusinesses