Disaster backup and recovery are important topics because a lot of businesses are unaware of their existing safeguards. They think everything is great, and it isn’t — their backup solutions aren’t functioning properly. That’s a pretty common discovery for us during an initial assessment.

How Often Should Organizations Backup their Data?

How often you back up your system depends on a few factors, including your business goals and the equipment you have in place. A general rule of thumb, however, is that you should back up anything that changes regularly every hour or so.

Sometimes backups should occur more often, depending on what you’re backing up. Typically, we recommend full backups fairly infrequently, maybe on a monthly basis. Then you can do incremental backups from there.

Our standard practice is to take a snapshot of the data every hour or so to back up the changes that happened since the last backup. By doing it this way, you can store a lot of changes without having a huge amount of data. It’ll just store the differences from the last time.

There are several different backup solutions available, each with a different architecture. One common practice is backing up on-premise production servers to a backup server. From there, you can copy the data to an off-site or cloud backup solution.

If you have a smaller system or servers strictly in the cloud, there are additional options for backup and recovery solutions.

For example, we’ll do a direct to cloud backup. Rather than copying from the production host to a backup host and then going to the cloud, it copies directly from the production host to the cloud service that backs up your information.

How Far Back Should Your Backups Go?

The number of backups you keep really depends on your business and your business goals. Most people like to have at least 30 days of backup, so they can go back at any point in time and get a file as it was 30 days ago.

That said, some industries are required by regulations to keep information for at least seven years. Lots of organizations are required to do that for accounting purposes. And it’s good to have historical archive data as well so you can go back several years and get information as it existed then.

The amount of time it takes to restore a backup depends on the task at hand. If you’re just looking for a version of one specific file from two weeks ago, that can happen in a couple of minutes. A full disaster recovery, however, can take a little bit longer to get back up and running.

In the event of a hardware failure or something like that, some systems can get you back up and running in a matter of minutes, while some take a couple of hours.

Staking Your Backup and Recovery Needs to Your Business Goals

We typically start an IT partnership by sitting down with our clients to understand their business goals. And we ask how quickly they’ll need to be back up and running after a disaster or unexpected event. When we have that information, we’ll put an appropriate solution in place.

Backup solutions can range from something that takes a matter of minutes to several hours to restore everything.

Data loss often leads to business failure, or at the very least, severe business impact. The common theme among organizations that have experienced this is that nobody wants to do it again. It is a real painful memory when they talk about going through that process. Sometimes, if they’re unable to get their data back at all, they might end up actually losing their business.

If you’re interested in finding a way to improve your backup and disaster recovery solution, click here and we’ll be glad to help you out.