Losing data that is critical to your home or business is embarrassing at a minimum, and business-ending at its worst. Losing it all on April Fool’s Day (April 1st’) would only add salt to the wound, but you know it’s happened to someone out there. This is what makes the relatively new occasion of World Backup Day on March 31st ever so timely.
The original goal of this industry holiday was to inform those who have never backed up their data and educate those who didn't understand the true risk of operating without a reliable backup.
But World Backup Day should be a reminder to all of us, that even those of us who regularly back up our data must perform test restores and check our backup strategies to ensure that we are prepared in the event of catastrophic failure.
Here are a few items to check in your backup routine (or your customer’s) to ensure that you are as prepared as you believe you are:
- Restore Speed
Perform a test restore from a local destination and any offsite/cloud destination. If you believe that doing a test restore from the cloud will take forever, it’s not a good sign of what to expect when a real emergency exists.
- The Right Data
Are your backup jobs capturing the necessary data, including daily changes, databases, and virtual machines? What about applications and operating systems in a system image backup?
- Data Retention
Are you keeping the data that you need long enough, and are you removing unnecessary data to maximize your data storage space?
- Storage Locations
Are you keeping data available locally as well as offsite? Keeping a set of backups at an offsite location insures you against a localized natural disaster.
- Legal Requirements
What industry-specific regulations must your business comply with (HIPAA, PCI, etc.) and are you observing the mandated requirement for how long data must be retained?
- Transfer Protocol
Should someone besides yourself have to perform the restore for the company, is there documentation explaining what must be done?
What would you do if you lost everything? Our World Backup Day Infographic offers additional Data Loss Prevention Tips on how to best protect your critical data. You can download NovaBACKUP's complete Backup Strategy Guide here. Help spread the good word about World Backup Day, so that your friends and business partners never have to experience critical data loss.
