Your essential guide to data backup and why you need it

What would happen if you lost your data?

Let’s start with this scary thought! If you lost your data, chances are your operation would be compromised and suddenly stop. With no way of fulfilling orders or servicing your clients you no longer have a business. Ouch!

There are various ways you can lose your data, and we’ll move onto that cheery section soon, but in the meantime let’s explore what data backup is and how it can help you.

What is data backup?

Data backup is a copy or archive of information stored on your computer, tablet or phone. That copy is used to restore your data in the event that it is lost so that your business can continue as if the loss never occurred.

• No downtime.
• No loss of productivity.
• No damage to your bottom line.

Zestly are managed IT providers. As part of a managed IT package, we regularly back up data for our clients to ensure they are protected from data loss.

What can cause data loss?

Hard drive failures can cause a loss of data, as can software corruption. Regularly maintaining your hardware and software as part of a managed IT package can avoid these failures, but when they do occur, they can be devastating for businesses.

Cyberattacks are responsible for a significant proportion of data loss incidents. Robust, continually updated, cyber security is essential to keep a step ahead of cyber criminals.

Human error and theft of devices also account for many data loss events. These are difficult to avoid but the result is the same if you don’t have a data backup system in place.

Data backup strategies to protect your business

There are some basics to address first. At Zestly we would advocate keeping at least three copies of your data which should be stored in at least two different formats. You can choose between disks, tapes and cloud. One of the copies should be off site in case of physical threats such as theft, fires, floods and other disasters.

You can choose between three main types of backup:

• Full backup – the entire folders, files and information of a company compressed into zip files. This is a starting point for other types of backup.
• Differential backup – to only backup the files that have changed since the last full backup.
• Incremental backup – backs up just the files that have changed since the last full, differential or incremental backup.

Choosing a data backup solution

As we touched on earlier, there are various types of data backup solutions to choose from. Here are three main types.

Cloud backup

Cloud backup provides flexible storage. Stored offsite on remote servers with infinite space, data backed up to the cloud is usually encrypted for data security. As part of your backup strategy, you can organise automated backups of complete systems if required. Data backed up to the cloud is easy to access so restoring lost data is processed quickly.

External hard drives

External hard drives such as USB flash drives and SSDs (solid state drives) provide ample storage of data.

Online storage

The likes of Dropbox and Google Drive store backups of data files but these services can be limited. They can’t accommodate multiple versions and they’re unable to back up complete systems.

At Zestly we would recommend cloud data backup, although our managed IT services can include the safe implementation and running of regular data backups across a range of options.

Zestly can manage your data backups for peace of mind

For more information on how Zestly can manage your data backups, get in touch with the team for an informal chat.