What are Backups?
There are an incredible amount of methods for performing backups, but in IT Terms, a backup is your chosen method of making regular copies of your data. This covers anything from keeping a copy of a file on a USB to having multiple copies saved on your computer.
This may not sound overwhelmingly important, but these run of the mill methods of backing up are only really meant for personal usage, for small amounts of data.
If you have a company, which relies on your data, and the data of co-workers, professionally maintained backups may be the only thing saving a small accident from weeks of cost and time spent trying to be fixed.
This post will mention a few methods companies use to professionally maintain backups.
Why are Backups important?
Backups are vitally important. Not only will it save you time and money, but a business needs to spend the resources to ensure that their backup methods can scale with its natural growth in size, as backup systems improperly setup will grow to be incredibly complex, as a company goes from 2 to 5 to 20 to 70 people.
So what if you don’t use them?
One of the common issues we’ve all faced at some point is that you’ve accidentally deleted something. A file, maybe something you’ve worked on for a few hours, or a day. All that work, all gone.
Here’s another problem we all dread: Your files have become corrupt. Your important spreadsheet is unreadable. So much information lost. How long will it take to be re-written? How many people are depending on it?
What about your computer itself? Somebody has stolen your laptop, or maybe it’s been broken. Sure you could buy a new one, and might even get it in working order quickly, but what about all that data? All of those important files? How much would it take to replace it all? Could you even replace it all? Or down the line would you remember an important file you need is just lost forever?
The scariest example may be rare but could cause incredible damage: Hackers. Cyber-Criminals can use Ransomware on your devices to steal all of the data your company owns, and threaten you for more money in order for the data to be returned.
Ransomware could cause unparalleled damage to an unprepared company, but with backups, after the malware is removed, they may have very little to hold over your head.
At JustGilbey, we can recommend a few ways a company can implement to backup your files:
Cloud Backups
This type may be perfect for your needs. Affordable and popular, a lot of people, nowadays will try to use Google Drive or OneDrive for this, as their abilities as a backup are improving, but these abilities simply aren’t enough to rely on, if you need to revert a disastrous change.
As this may only be viable for very small businesses, at JustGilbey, we maintain Cloud Backups for our Clients using third party services, as recommended by Microsoft.
As, if data held on Microsoft Servers is damaged, backups also held on Microsoft servers may not be as helpful as you’d hope.
Using our Cloud-Service, you can specify the employees you want to secure, and every 4 hours, they’re all backed up, so everyone is constantly secured from data loss.
Local Backups
This is the old fashioned one, where you copy all of your files to a device and copy them back if something goes wrong.
Everyone uses USBs, but larger companies, need a far more complex system, as one or two people with a few spreadsheets can be simple to backup, but twenty to seventy people with years of documents can be a nightmare to backup.
At JustGilbey, when a client needs local backups, we ensure they are created daily of the changes which have occurred since the last backup, so any changes can be reversed at the perfect time.
If you’d like to try your and at setting up Local Backups, have you heard of the 3-2-1 method?
Using this, you keep three copies of your data. Two of these will be on different types of devices, and one of the devices will need to be offsite.
Thanks for spending the time to read this. – Dylan IT Apprentice
If you’d like to learn more about backups, feel free to read through a post we made on Backup Statistics, or contact us via our website to book a (completely free!) talk regarding backups!