Tag Archives: data recovery

5 Simple Data Backup and Data Loss Tips for Small Businesses

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As a small business, it is important have a plan in place for backing up and securing your data.

As a small business, it is important have a plan in place for backing up and securing your data.

As your business grows and you continue to implement new technologies into your business, it becomes increasingly important that your business properly backs up your data on a regular basis. Data loss can be extremely detrimental to any business, and even force many businesses to shut their doors within a few short months of the data loss taking place. Luckily, there are some simple measures that your business can take that will help you to ensure that you are safe from data loss and able to maintain your systems appropriately. Follow these basic tips to safeguard your business and mitigate data loss risk.

1. Preparedness is Key

The best thing that a business can do to protect themselves against data loss is to have a plan in place in the event that data loss occurs. This begins with ensuring that you have the proper backup systems in place. All businesses should institute daily (or at least weekly) backups both in the cloud and on physical hard drives to ensure that no data is truly lost. It is also a good idea to speak with a company that are experts in data loss and data recovery, who can help you to put together a preparedness plan that keeps your business safe.

2. Start with Proper Policies and Training

Did you know that internal employees are responsible for almost half of all data loss? We can’t always account for human error, but a great way to mitigate internal data loss risk is to ensure that you have the proper policies in place to ensure that your employees are properly trained on mitigating data loss. Additionally, make sure that your team is properly trained on handling sensitive data, as one of the leading causes of data theft is actually internal teams sending data to the wrong person, or including data that is sensitive in an email unknowingly. By putting effective policies in place you can greatly reduce the risk of data loss and theft.

3. Backup on Two Physical Hard Drives

All businesses should have a physical copy of their data backed up on a regular basis. The most simple and inexpensive way to achieve this is to keep your data backed up on at least two physical hard drives. This helps to ensure that your data remains safe even if the main system and one of the physical backups fails. The chances of that are highly unlikely, and the chances of having all three fail are even more unlikely. Backups should be scheduled on a daily or weekly basis depending on your businesses’ data needs.

4. Do not Keep Sensitive Data on Laptops

One of the easiest ways for a thief to gain access to sensitive data is by stealing a company laptop, which is a much more common occurrence than you would think. Try to keep all sensitive data off of employee and company laptops and ensure that you are storing all data on removal flash drives. This helps to ensure that the data is properly backed up, without making for a security risk.

5. Regularly Test Your Backups

Not only should you be scheduling backups on a daily or weekly basis, but you should also be testing those backups all the time. Try to test each of your backups (and also check your cloud data backup systems for stability) at least once per week so that you can have peace of mind and know that everything is working as intended.

If you are interested in putting together a data loss prevention plan that is customized for your business, please reach out and contact us today to schedule your initial chat with our data loss experts.

Why Every Business Needs Backup Disaster Recovery Solutions

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Businesses need a strong plan in place for data recovery in order to protect themselves and their customers, yet many still do not.

Businesses need a strong plan in place for data recovery in order to protect themselves and their customers, yet many still do not.

Any business that stores important business and customer data should have a backup recovery contingency plan in place. Many small and medium-sized businesses grossly underestimate the effect of data loss on businesses, and as a result put themselves in a precarious position that could come back to bite them. Just a few small steps can help to protect data from potential loss, with very little resources required. There is truly no excuse for not putting these simple measures in place when growing a business. Businesses have relatively few reasons why they shouldn’t prepare for data loss disasters, but many reasons why they should.

Companies Rarely Test Their Backups

According to Boston Computing, very few companies actively test the backups that they create. Even fewer stick to a rigid backup schedule, despite the fact that there are many automatic backup solutions available. Even if your company is performing backups, you must make sure that you are actively testing those backups to ensure that the data stored on them was stored without issue and no further failures have taken place. Make sure that you are actively testing your backups and ensuring that the data stored on them is reliable for data restoration, should data loss take place.

All Hardware Fails Eventually

There isn’t a single piece of tech hardware available today that will be working seamlessly 50 years from now with regular use. Your hardware systems are going to fail, it’s just a matter of when. When that failure occurs, it is important that you not only have taken steps to ensure that data is not lost forever, but have a plan in place with a backup disaster recovery company that can be quickly put into action to mitigate the losses that your business suffers. Do not place a lot of faith in the hardware that you are using and makes sure that you back up your data across several iterations to ensure that no data is lost when your hardware does fail.

Human Error is a Huge Risk

According to a study from the IT Policy Compliance Group, human error is the number one reason for lost data among businesses. Employees can accidentally delete records, forget to backup information, and generally mishandle data. It is important that your business has the proper policies in place to mitigate this risk. Employees should be trained on properly storing and handling your sensitive business data, and even then you can bet that some data will slip through the cracks. Having the right systems in place can help to reduce the risk of data being lost as a result of human error.

Plan Ahead

The first and best step that any business can take is to contact a backup disaster recovery (BDR) service provider and work with them to put a plan together that will suit your business needs. There is a large amount of risk that comes with data loss. Most companies that suffer a data disaster are truly never able to fully recover, and many end up shutting their doors if their sensitive business data can not be recovered. Having a plan in place and taking proper precautions will help to not only reduce the chances of data loss effecting your business, but will also make the recovery and cleanup process much more streamlined.

If you would like to ensure that your business is safe from potential issues associated with data loss, please contact us today to schedule your initial 100% risk-free consultation. We’ll walk you through the process of protecting your business, while helping you implement backup and data storage processes that protect your data and provide you with peace of mind.

Data Backup: Why It’s Important, and How to Do it Properly

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Schofield's Law of Computing states that your data doesn't actually exist unless you have at least two copies of it -- so make sure you have a good backup system in place.

Schofield’s Law of Computing states that your data doesn’t actually exist unless you have at least two copies of it — so make sure you have a good backup system in place.

Data Backup is a fairly important thing.  Whether you’re backing up your company’s entire server, or just some of the machines scattered around, having a backup of them is always a good idea.

“Why should I,” I can hear you asking through the internet “I’m sure nothing will go wrong with my computer that will make me lose my data.”  Well, funny thing is, it might.  Computers are rather fickle things, and are subject to tons of problems at some point or another.  A lot of people, especially people who tinker with their computers, have had some form of terrible thing happen that resulted in their data going away forever.

Schofield’s Second Law of Computing states that your data doesn’t really exist unless you have at least two copies of it.

Truer words have never been spoken.  Data backup is a fairly important thing to do for many reasons.  I’ll list some of those below

The main reason you’ll want to do it is for disaster recovery.  If your company’s main server room goes up in flames, your data is gone.  If you didn’t have a backup of it somewhere, it’s really gone.  Off-site backup is always useful to have in situations like this, because the server room will probably go up in flames at the same time the rest of the building does.  You don’t want to be stuck having to gather all of your business’ data, as well as reconstructing your whole building.

Another reason is just in case something weird happens.  Computers can mess up data on occasion, or sometimes just delete it.  You would usually have some form of on-site backup if this happens, since you don’t want to have to get an employee to drive across town to pick up your tape backups from the storage facility just because your computer bugged out or because you had to re-install an operating system.

You’ll always want to have at least a few backups.  There was a time where tape backups were commonplace, and they still are to an extent, but off-site BDR is become more common by the day, and it’s every bit as cheap as tapes are.  It’s more convenient, as well, since you don’t have to send an employee across town to grab a tape because some jack-leg stepped on yours and your system decided some file was irrelevant.

And, for the final part of this explanation, there are 3 types of backups: full, incremental, and differential.  A full backup will backup the entire system.  An incremental backs up the system and marks every file that it’s backed up, ignoring those in future backups.  If a file has been changed, the mark gets removed, and the next incremental backs it up and marks it again.  A differential backs up all files that have changed since the last full backup.

Full backups are the easiest to use, since you only need one of them to restore.  The problem with this is that it uses more disk space than the other two backups.  You should do these once per week just in case something went wrong with the last one, since you’ll probably be combining these with a differential.

Incremental backups are probably the hardest to use, since you need every single incremental backup since the last full backup performed.  So, if you crash on Sunday and your full backups are Monday, you have to restore your full backup, and then 5 incremental in order from oldest to newest.  If you mix up two of the incremental (say Tuesday and Wednesday), then the one from Tuesday will overwrite the one from Wednesday, or just not work and you’ve just wasted your time.

With differential backups, you only need two backups to restore.  You need the last differential and the last full.  Most programs overwrite the oldest differential available since you don’t need it, so you’ll save space on your backup media.

We provide online backups here at SystemsNet, and you can contact us in order to set up your subscription with us.