This is GetMorePC podcast number four, “Three Things To Look At For Your Backup Solution”. Three things to be mindful of in your backup solution.
Those three things are:
- That it is happening.
- That it’s happening also offsite so you’re covered for catastrophic failure.
- That it is secure. What good is the backup if anybody can get to it?
Let’s start with number one. A backup ain’t a backup unless it’s backing up on a regular basis. This needs to be a scheduled thing that needs to be happening. The best way to find out if that’s the case is to just do a restore. You don’t want to wait until there is actually a disaster to try to do a restore. Do one now to just see where is the file that we made last week. Can we get to it from offsite? No? You probably need to reevaluate your backup. It’s probably not working. Is your backup working? That’s the first and foremost most important thing to check about your backup.
Number two, is your backup offsite? That is this something that you really don’t want to find out after the case and that’s part of the reason I’m doing this video. If you’ve had some kind of a disaster happen at your office, say there’s a flood, a fire or theft. Where’s your backup at? Was it offsite?
GetMorePC offers managed off-site backups at a very affordable rate of a dollar a gigabyte. It’s very competitive and you can know via reports that these backups are happening. They’re off-site, so your whole business could get hit by a meteor and we can go to your backup login, download the program and restore the files. There are all of your files. It has to be off-site. It can’t be only on site. You should do on-site too because a lot of those are quicker to restore. If you have an external hard drive and that external hard drive is connected to the server it can get fried if your server gets fried.
Number three, is it secure? If you have files and they’re important to you, important enough to back up, they’re probably somewhat sensitive and you probably don’t want everybody in the world seeing what they are. A common way to move files from one place to another is an FTP. Maybe you’re just dumping all your files up to an FTP. There’s a problem, FTP is not a secure protocol. That file is not being encrypted as it’s being transferred to the FTP server. That’s one example on how to secure a backup.
I’ll give you a more detailed example. It may be that you have security protocol in place on the folders that you’re trying to backup. Somebody needs access to this, and somebody needs access to something else. You may want to preserve that folder security structure in your backups which is not impossible. It’s easy. Your NTFS security structure needs to be preserved. Are the files encrypted when they’re backed up? So if somebody got into your backup system and they started looking at your files could they get to them? Or would they need a decryption key? Do you have that decryption key stored somewhere safe?
These are the things I think about whenever I set it back up for a client. Hopefully, it’s what your IT is thinking about whenever they set it up. If you don’t know about them and your backup is sort of just being handled by somebody else, there really should be documentation for that, just in case God forbid your IT guy got hit by a bus. Somebody else needs to know how to get into the backup files. If you are the business owner, you may want to know how to get your backup files.
Those are my top three things to look at when you are evaluating your backup strategy, your disaster recovery strategy. I hope those are helpful to you. I’d love to talk to you about your backup strategy. I’m one of those weirdos that just loves to talk about backup strategies. I would much rather talk about backup before backup needs to have been run as opposed to afterward when we’re trying to do data recovery, which is costly. We have to send to drive off and somebody has to open the disc up and try to find the data that all those discs. That’s not a fun thing to do.
Leave a Reply