As a business owner or employee, you may have heard the term “data backup” before. Data backup is the process of creating digital copies of your data to ensure its safety in the event of accidental data loss. Every day people use backups of their data to recover and restore files. You probably understand that data backup is important, and that many businesses use it, but do you know why? It is often easy to misunderstand the importance of things like data backup since it is so common and simple, but it is important to fully understand what you are doing to protect your data.
Data backup is a critical component of cybersecurity and general business operations. For example, if a cybercriminal were to somehow gain access to your systems and attempt to hold your data hostage, via an encryption scheme, a backup of that data could save you from an irreversible, devastating loss. Or, if you need to access previous versions of a document, accidentally delete a file, or your computer crashes while working, a data backup could help you recover lost data. In the event of a disaster, data loss without a data backup could lead to significant financial, productivity, and reputational damages.
Things like hardware failures, malware attacks, disc failures, power outages, software corruption, or even things like human error or natural disasters are all unavoidable things that could cause data loss and result in a major disruption to your workday. Because the causes of data loss are generally unpredictable, it is important to have your data set to backup regularly and reliably. Even if your data is saved in the cloud and not to a physical device, data backup is extremely important. Those files can still be accidentally over-written or deleted, too. There are several backup strategies that can be implemented to keep your data safe.
There are three different kinds of data backups: full, incremental, and differential. Full data backups are reliable and create a complete copy of all of your data, but can be time-consuming and take up a lot of storage space. Incremental backups only backup data that has changed since the last backup, either full or incremental, saving time and storage. Differential backups only backup data that has changed since the last full backup, offering a reliable middle-ground between full and incremental. Additionally, in IT there is a rule for data backups called the 3-2-1 rule. This rule states that companies should have three copies of their data, one being the primary and two being backups, which is stored on at least two different types of media, and one copy is kept off-site. This strategy offers the most reliable protection of your data.
It is also crucial that your data backup procedures be checked regularly and that you have tested your data recovery processes. Data backups can almost always be automated to ensure that they are occurring securely and efficiently and so they don’t require valuable time and staff resources. When it comes to data backups, it is better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it!
Read our previous post here: The Importance of Password Security
