#WeekendWisdom 013 Data Backups
Welcome to #WeekendWisdom number 13. This week we’re going to talk about Data Backups.
Why do you need data backups?
If you have any computers in your organisation then you will probably have data that you need to backup. Data backups are really crucial to be able to recover your data in case of an incident such as a fire, flood or ransomware.
I have somebody responsible for doing my backups
If you have an IT Department or IT service provider, I suggest that you challenge them to prove to you that they are backing up your data correctly and that the backups are working. That could be getting a monthly log from them to show the backup successes and failures.
Also you should challenge them to prove that they have tested the recovery of data from those backups. They don’t have to do that every week or every day but perhaps on a monthly basis they could do it or no more than on a quarterly basis that they test the recovery of some of the data.
I have everything in the cloud, so I’m OK
If you depend on the cloud, don’t just put all your eggs in the one basket and stick things in the cloud and believe they’re safe. that’s not always the case, you should have some offline copies of your backup as well.
Oops – I have no Data Backups. What can I do?
So if you have no backup strategy in place at the moment, I would suggest you use a strategy I call 3-2-1-1. That’s having 3 copies of your data, one of which is your live working copy. The other 2 copies should be on two separate media. So that could be an external hard drive, USB sticks or in the cloud. Then 1 copy should be off-site which could be a cloud copy. Finally 1 copy should be off-line. This means it iss not connected to any computer unless its being backed up to. So that will protect you against Ransomware.
So that’s it for this week. Let’s be careful out there and we’ll talk to you again next week.