One of the critical pieces of your business is its information. The data your company has is crucial for ongoing success. Not only is the regularly used data crucial, but there is always legacy information that is tucked away, and never thought of until that one time it becomes crucial. Keeping all that information safe and retrievable is one of the most important things you can do to protect your organization. Managing backups and restoring them is essential to a Backup Disaster Recovery (BDR) plan.
A good BDR backup plan will define:
These are five common data archiving mistakes people often make that you should avoid:
Manually creating data backups is never a good idea. We've seen all kinds of strategies from Post-It Notes to daily reminders from your phone to make this work, but none of them do. Data backups are most often needed to recover from human error. Don’t add more human error to the process. Automate your data backup routine!
No one place is safe for all your information. For all its ephemeral characteristics, data is still stored on a physical medium. The worst case is that the physical media is stored at the same place where the data normally resides. This opens the possibility of losing everything at the same time. Your BDR plan should identify how long to keep the latest copy on site, while making sure all your backups are also stored off-site, in the cloud, or both.
This is fate twisting the knife when the worst happens. If information gets accidentally deleted you immediately start your data recovery plan. Imagine the horror when you find the backup is corrupt or incomplete. Make sure all copies are tested before they are considered complete.
This goes hand-in-hand with the problem of relying on a single location. Just like you shouldn’t be dependent on one physical media location, you shouldn’t be dependent on a single backup. All backup strategies should include multiple copies of the same backup.
Make sure your backup strategy stays up to date. Take the time to move old backups to new media. If that isn’t possible, keep some of the old equipment around so the copies can still be read.
Learn from others' mistakes! Avoid these five common data archiving mistakes and you'll have a much smoother operation the day something unexpected happens.
Successful data recovery means having a solid BDR backup plan that accounts for the above. Keeping your data safe and secure is something we are very passionate about. To learn more about the importance of a good BDR backup plan or how to evaluate your options take a look at some of our other articles:
