On March 31, World Backup Day, an awareness day for the important of backing up, took place. It’s stunning, then, that in a recent study found that under 15% of businesses said that they were confident they could recover data in the event of a disaster.

Backup is a vital part of any business’s IT plan. Let’s discuss why it’s so important, and our approach to backing up.

The Dangers of Not Backing Up

Imagine that you walked into your work tomorrow and everything related to your computers and network was gone. The files on everyone’s computers, all records on the company’s server, networking configurations, and more — vanished in an instant.

This sounds dramatic, but it’s quite possible. A virus or other kind of malware could breach your network and destroy everything connected to it. In fact, Boeing recently fell victim to a ransomware attack. Aside from malware, a natural disaster, malicious user, or simple mistake could result in the loss of loads of data.

What would happen to your business if you lost this data? You’d be unable to serve customers, and it would take weeks to restore all the information you lost (if you could at all). The amount of time you’d have to spend in recovery would cripple your business for a dangerous amount of time, possibly even putting you out of business.

That’s why you can’t risk not backing up.

The Principles of a Good Backup

A proper backup keeps copies of your data offsite. Because it’s located somewhere else, even in the case of a flood or physical damage at your location, a copy of your data remains safe. This can also be combined with a local backup for faster restoration, but an offsite backup is essential.

In addition, backups must be done regularly. If a backup program isn’t automated, it’s easy to forget about running the backups. This could result in a disaster. Backing up at least every day makes it much less likely you’ll lose a large amount of work.

Business backups should also have testing built into them. When your server backup fails, you should know about it immediately so you can address it. Not knowing about these issues for weeks could lead to unprotected data. Our alerting system lets us know about these issues so we can handle them quickly.

Recovering from a Backup

While trying to recover without a backup is nearly impossible, restoring your data from a proper backup is comparatively simple. Our backup software makes it easy to select the data you’d like to restore from the software on the affected machine, or through the website. This works for both small restorations (recovering one accidentally deleted file) and large ones (recovering years of receipts from your server).

Additionally, the backup software we use is available anytime, meaning you can get access to your files whenever you need.

Another important part of choosing the best backup solution is knowing how fast you’ll be able to recover your data. Downloading an enormous amount of files over the internet will take some time, which delays your company getting back up and running. A local backup, meanwhile, is much faster for restoration.

Some backup providers will ship a USB drive to you overnight, enabling you to restore the lost data much more quickly than you could by downloading it.

Not Backing Up Is Too Risky

If you’re a business owner, you should know that failing to back up could be a fatal mistake for your company. Statistically, the hard drives in your company’s machines will fail eventually, and you can’t predict natural disasters, theft, and similar scenarios.

The comparatively small amount of money it costs to have a proper backup will pay off in an instant when you can recover everything you lost with relative ease. If you want to avoid taking chances and protect your company’s information with a backup, take a look at our backup and disaster recovery page for more information.

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