IT infrastructure, security & maintenance
A backup strategy for small businesses: keeping your data truly safe
6 min read
A failed server, a deleted folder or ransomware: sooner or later every business needs its backup. Whether it works is decided long before. These questions help you build a backup strategy that holds when it matters.
Two questions first
- How much work can you afford to lose at most? An hour, a day, a week? That decides how often you back up.
- How quickly must you be working again? Within an hour or within three days? That decides how the restore has to be prepared.
What needs backing up
- The databases of your applications, such as industry software, shop or CRM
- File storage and shared folders
- Email and calendars
- Data in cloud services, because mistakes and deletions happen there too
- Server and network configurations, so everything can be rebuilt
The 3-2-1 rule
Three copies of your data, on two different types of storage, one of them in another location. Against ransomware, add a copy that cannot be changed or deleted afterwards, not even with administrator rights.
Encrypt and test
Backups contain everything your business is made of, so they belong encrypted. And they only count once the restore has been tested: regularly restore a backup as a trial and measure how long it takes. Many nasty surprises only show up in this test.
A backup is not an archive
A backup lets you keep working after a failure. An archive keeps business records for the legally required period, often ten years. You need both, but they are not the same thing.
Make someone responsible
- Who checks that the backups run every night?
- Who is alerted when one fails?
- Who knows how the restore works, even during the holidays?
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