It is impossible to harp on this subject enough. Backing up your computer, or your content in a business setting, is so critical to survival now that it cannot be discussed too much. The virus and hacker threats on the Internet are getting worse every day and no security product on the planet can protect your company data completely from loss or corruption.
The only way to keep data loss from disrupting your company’s operations, or from causing damage so severe that the company cannot recover, is to be proactive and maintain current and complete backups.
Many people think they are taking the steps necessary to backup important information by creating second copies on the same drive the initial copy resides on. This can only provide recovery in the event of accidental deletion or an unwanted change to a document that is then saved so that it overwrites the original.
For a backup to be effective the data must, must be saved to a completely different device. Hard drives fail more than any other computer component, and when they fail the data they holds is gone. If data is duplicated on the same drive both versions will be gone.
If data is duplicated on a second device, whether it’s an external hard drive, or DVDs, or just copied to a second computer it’s protected from almost any threat and can at least be recovered and restored to operation. There are still ways some of the newer viruses, and especially newer versions of ransomware, can cause problems but if you take the right steps to protect and restore your data you will prevent the loss of irreplaceable pictures, communications from loved ones, or critical financial records.
The most important thing to remember when choosing and configuring a backup solution is that the destination must be a separate physical device, whether that device is in or out of the building. To truly protect valuable data, things that are so important that their loss would be catastrophic or heart-breaking, the destination must be somewhere outside of building – on another physical device and at another physical location entirely.
More on this, and best practices, next time.