Importance of Backups

Everyone knows backups are important, but just having a backup of your data isn't the only consideration when planning your backup strategy. This is not a complete guide, but meant to highlight additional considerations when defining your backup strategy.

1. Is the backup encrypted? This is important to consider because if someone gets access to your backup data will they be able to read it? With the ever increase news of companies being hacked, you want to make sure if your data is compromised it can't be easily viewed.

2. Immutable backup. Does the backup prevent changes to the backup for a set period of time, so it can't be deleted or modified. If someone does gain access to your server, does your backup software require a password to login and does it have a forced retention policy to prevent the hacker from deleting your backups from within the software. This also protects against ransomware attacks.

3. The 3-2-1 rule. 3 copies of your data, 2 different media types, 1 offsite. This is a common recommendation and a robust starting point is can be adjusted according to needs, but I suggest a minimum have 1 local copy and 1 offsite copy of your data.

4. The type of backup, full, incremental, or differential. My recommendation is a weekly full backup and daily incremental or differential backup. The difference being what has changed since last backup, differential is changes since the last full backup. How often you backup is going to be influenced by how much data loss you can afford vs storage cost. You might consider hourly or continues backups for mission critical files.

5. Lastly monitoring and testing. Backups are useless if you aren't verifying they complete and test restore procedure. Monitoring should be daily, testing should be decided based on company needs. I'm a fan of quarterly or yearly testing, but if this is mission critical data that is constantly changing, some might want to do it monthly. Test different types of restores, single file, all files, server restore is also important.