How File Backup is Crucial to Business Users
Author: Conrad Chung, 2BrightSparks Pte. Ltd.
Regardless how small or large your business is, it is vital to have regular backups in order to secure your company’s data. It is arguably the most important task to undertake for preventing data loss in case of disasters.
In the event of system failure, a security breach (like ransomware), or a natural disaster, having a solid backup plan in place ensures that you have recoverable data to fall back on and keep your business running. Here are some reasons why you need to have a backup plan and some advice on how to implement a backup strategy.
Without Backups, Natural Disasters Could Destroy Your Data, and Your Business
According to FEMA, 40 percent of businesses fail to reopen after suffering a natural disaster. As a lot of these businesses failed to backup their data, all their data would be wiped out during the disaster forcing them to restart from scratch.
Having a backup ensures that all your crucial data can still be recovered following the disaster.
Ransomware Incidents Spreading Like Wildfire
A global trend that is growing rapidly is the malicious spread of ransomware. If your business is hit with it, all data in your network is encrypted and requires ransom payment to hackers to unlock.
Small business owners might regard this threat as trivial as they may think it will not happen to them. However, according to Datto’s State of the Channel Ransomware Report, the amount of global ransomware attacks against small-to-mid-sized businesses (SMBs) have been soaring since 2016.
With a secure backup, you can avoid paying the ransom and restore your data from a clean copy. Our backup program, SyncBack, even has ransomware detection features to prevent your backed-up data from being replaced by infected files in the event of an attack.
Costly to Businesses Without a Backup Plan When Data Loss Occurs
A plan to backup your data on a regular basis is like purchasing insurance for your business. With modern businesses relying on computer systems and networks, a loss of company data could seriously hurt your company finances.
According to an article from Datacore, site outages usually cost businesses a minimum of $20k per day of downtime, with a quarter of organizations reporting that downtime costing over $100k per day.
Thus, it’s not difficult to see why an effective backup strategy is crucial for any business.
Peace of Mind with Regular Backups
Having a backup plan ensures you can quickly restore your data regardless what happens. Important data like customer records, payroll data, product information and business plans can easily be lost when something bad happens. A long list of bad things can occur at any time, from data corruption, to system failure or malware attacks.
For a business to fail, it just requires one bad event to occur and it could mean the end of your company. With backups, it lets you focus on the more important aspects of your business like delivering good product and value to your customers. Our backup and synchronization program, SyncBack, will let you setup cost-effective backup strategies, so there is no reason to leave your business unprotected by skipping regular backups.
Recommended Backup Strategies
Here are some backup tips you may find useful. Firstly, you can start with:
A Simple Backup: If your business has not setup any backups at all, it might be ideal to quickly start by creating a simple backup to an external disk first. This ensures you have at least a copy of your data as backup. If you use SyncBack, our beginner’s guide may be useful. This guide also outlines how to create a schedule for your backup, so that your profile can be set up to run on a regular basis.
Setup a 3-2-1 Strategy: Although there are many types of backup strategies, the 3-2-1 backup plan is highly effective, as it recommends having 3 data copies, store them at 2 different locations and keep 1 backup offsite. Our 3-2-1 Backup Strategy with SyncBack guide has further details on why this plan is so useful.
Cloud Backups: There are many affordable cloud storage providers in the Internet market and having backups stored on cloud is an important part of a smart backup strategy. With cloud backups, your off-site data are still safe in events that could damage your office premises (like natural disasters). We have many cloud articles in our Articles section. To start off, you can read about why cloud backup is useful and how to setup a cloud profile for Google Drive (applicable for other consumer cloud storage providers as well).
Testing Backups: Most people who backup their data usually tend to “set it and forget it”. As a result, unexpected failures like data corruption could go undetected and only found out during times of data loss and a restore is required. Thus, it’s important to test your backups from time to time to ensure they are not corrupted. SyncBackPro comes with file integrity checking capability which helps to ensure backups are not corrupted.
Ransomware Protection: While having a backup might mitigate some risk from ransomware, it would not help if your automated backup triggers on schedule and replaces your backup files with the infected files from your main systems. Therefore, it’s important for a backup program to recognize the main files have been compromised and abort all backups if so. With SyncBack V8, it comes with ransomware detection. Read our Ransomware Detection to see how it works and our Ransomware - how to protect yourself article provides tips on how to protect yourself from them.
Conclusion
Backing up your business data is an essential task that needs to be performed regularly and should not be neglected. Once done, you'll have peace of mind that your data is safe. Don’t wait until a disaster occurs and live to regret it when your data are lost. Visit our store today to get your SyncBack license and start your backup journey.
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