Wednesday, December 11

Best Practices for Data Backup on Your Computer

Having a redundant copy stored elsewhere, say, on an external drive, is inexpensive, easily implemented, and simple to do properly. This is in most cases very efficient at protecting against data loss with minimal delay.

There are a few ways to back up your data, each with their own pros and cons. One place to start is with the 3-2-1 backup rule.

Keep a copy of your data on an external drive

Two copies of your data on two different media would be the ideal safe-keeping. Having these backups created automatically is a good idea, as is making them manually, but in both cases at least the two copies should be kept off site. For instance, you could use an external hard drive and USB flash drive for backup, which gives you redundancies in case one of the devices fails. Digital clutter will be reduced by monitoring your backups and cleaning them up regularly. Doing so will make restoration much faster when you need a file. As well, archive or back up at a schedule that feels right to your workload (most people, though, benefit from daily archives). If you plan on back ups more frequently than once a day, or if your storage needs far exceed daily amounts, cloud-based solutions might be far more scalable than anything you can buy or build yourself.

Keep a copy of your data on a network drive

What about distributed storage, which might consist of one disk locally and one each at a friend’s and a business associate’s houses, so that two of them have to be broken into to get at your data? A few years ago, this was difficult to arrange, impractical to use, and expensive. But in modern times, this is more realistic, and increasingly practical and affordable, even for home users. Ideally, your backup scheme should operate on autopilot, airplane-filling-its-tires autopilot. If you want to pinch your cost penny, as they say, a scheme is best that backs up only the stuff you’ve changed since your most recent backup. These so-called incremental backups take up a minimum of hard drive room and time, and you can copy your data most frequently with the least added expense. Second, get as big a drive as you can afford; generally that means at least the size of the one inside your PC. That means you can best create your fulls a few days apart — or more frequently, depending on how often your files change or increase in size.

Store your backups offsite

Storage used to be quite costly because of the need to buy servers, tape libraries and employ staff to manage offsite backups. However, cloud services now make it easier than ever to create offsite backups for companies of any size. In this way, businesses of all sizes can enact a 3-2-1 backup rule whereby three copies of the data exist on two media types with another copy offsite, providing redundancy against effort, hardware failure, natural disaster and malware intrusion. Offsite backups can also have another benefit: they’re completely removed from your on-premise systems, so even if your backup systems were successfully cyberattacked, they couldn’t deliver those vulnerabilities to your primary systems. Offsite backups can also be ‘air gapped’, meaning they are physically disconnected when they are stored offsite. This means they can be restored more quickly than backup media stored on-premises, should you ever need to recover from them, but also means they can still be protected from any malware or ransomware moved from a primary system to a backup system.

Encrypt your backups

Secondly, backups are important parts of data protection, and you need them in case of a cyber attack or a natural disaster. But a backup that’s not protected in the same way your primary information is protected is useless. Intruders could steal your data from it. The security of encryption ensures that only people with the proper credentials can get to your information in the backup; otherwise they wouldn’t be able to read it. Integrity testing of backups ensures the integrity of the files during storage or transmission, decreasing the chances of data loss, and meeting the strict regulatory regulations like GDPR, HIPAA and PCI-DSS requirements. While backups might not be encrypted, it is still a worthwhile layer of precaution to feel more secure that cybercriminals won’t use your backups to access and exploit your private company information. Encryption can be used to make sure they are still available in a disaster or other emergency scenario.

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