Why should you worry about backups? You’ve never needed them in the past. Here are some reasons why you need backups.
Why Do You Need Backups?
Accidental Data Loss Prevention
Even if you’ve never experienced data loss, there will always be a first time. It’s late and you accidentally hit the delete button on your way out of the office. One of the main reasons backups are needed is accidental deletion by users. 75% of data loss is due to computer malfunction or human error
Keeping Your Business Open
43 percent of businesses that suffer major data loss don’t reopen afterward, according to a 2007 University of Texas study. Better to have a backup and not need it, then need a backup and not have it.
Ransomware, Malware, Viruses
As criminals get more devious, it gets harder to thwart them, but a good backup strategy is a good start. Ransomware is on the rise. Malware can encrypt your files leaving you with only a few options:
- Say Goodbye to your data
- Pay the attacker
- Recover your files from a backup
Physical Disaster
Nobody wants to think about something happening to their business. Just like you have insurance in case something happens to your building/house/car, having a backup is insurance for your data. Offsite backups are particularly important for recovering from disasters affecting your physical location.
Computer Malfunction
Every year millions of hard drives fail. Redundant disk setups can help reduce the chance of losing data, but even a RAID system is not a completely fail-safe system. You still need a plan for if the drives/RAID hardware fail.
Types of Backups
Onsite Backups
Keeping redundant data onsite is helpful for a lot of recovery scenarios. There are a few options for local backups, including:
- Thumb Drives
- External Hard Drives
- DVD-RW
- NAS
- Tape Drives
Most of these solutions only work when someone plugs in a new backup device each day/week. And tape drives are mostly cost prohibitive for small businesses. And unless you remove the physical media from your business location it is still susceptible to being destroyed by onsite disasters.
Offsite Backups
For most small businesses offsite backups can be the entire backup solution. There are many providers, and lots of opinions. Having a backup solution also allows you to look at previous versions of a file. Different backup solutions will keep a different number of revisions. And it will only have a revision for each time it backed up. If you backup nightly, it won’t have each version of the file from every edit yesterday, but it will have a revision of how the file looked at 2:00 AM (or whenever your backup runs) that you can restore.
Some good Backup providers:
No matter what your backup needs, Contact Us, or just give us a call, and we will get you setup so your business data is secure.