A good backup strategy for your business is something that everyone knows they're supposed to have, but very few actually do. Let's fix that.
I'm going to try an avoid making this complicated, but no promises.
What's a good backup strategy for your business?
This is what you need to have at a minimum:
- 3 copies of your data
- and at least 1 of them has to be offsite
You need 3 copies of your data in different places. That doesn't mean that you have three different folders on your hard drive each with a copy of your data. It's easy to make copies, and by having the copies of different places it reduces a chance of them all being wiped out by the same event. Get a couple of external hard drives and rotate them each week.
Since one of the copies of your data needs to be offsite, take one of the drives home. This will protect you against theft or a fire, for instance.
Simply alternate which drive you're taking home each week. If you keep track of this, you should always have a backup copy offsite that's no more than 1 week old.
What about online backups?
There are a lot of good online backup options. Here are a few of the better ones:
There are a couple of other services that a lot of people know, but they're not specifically backup services.
Just keep in mind that if you have a lot of data, it can take a while to complete an initial backup to an online service.
Check your backups before you need them.
Don't wait until you've lost something to make sure your backups are good. Check them periodically to make sure that they work properly and that you can access them before you need them.