Don’t let your backup solution fail you

Recently, as IT professionals, we had a company call us for help because their local-only backup solution hadn’t been working properly and their server crashed – resulting in a signification data loss.

As IT professionals, we have long been championing having a backup solution that includes off-site cloud replication of backup jobs – and also one that provides alerts or is monitored by our team so if the backup is failing, we can immediately get it fixed.

The fact is, backup solutions can and do fail and no one wants to manually rebuild their data from emails and other files. Additionally, our best solutions are referred to as business continuity solutions because they go above and beyond a traditional backup/disaster recovery solution in that you can spin up your most recent backup of your production environment on the backup appliance to keep you functioning while the production server is repaired or replaced, and then the current backup is restored to the repaired/replaced server.

Here are some things IT professionals recommend for backup solutions.

3-2-1 Rule

Have you heard of the 3-2-1 rule for backup solutions? It’s this: Three copies of your data on two different media with one copy offsite. AccuNet implements it in any of the backup/disaster recovery solutions we deploy for our clients like this:

Copy 1 is production data, copy 2 is local backup, and copy 3 is cloud-replicated backup in an off-site data center. That also puts the backups on three different media, as well.

It’s not three different backup solutions, but a single solution that incorporates multiple backups in different locations for security and redundancy.

The importance of The Cloud

While it’s important to backup your data in multiple ways, it’s hard to beat a cloud-based backup system. Your data will be saved and stored in the cloud until you need it and it’s generally a cost-effective and easy way to backup your data. The right cloud provider will handle the storage and security so you need fewer IT professionals monitoring your system.

Restoring your data from a breech or failure is often quicker with the cloud.

The fact is, local backup systems are particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks and they simply cannot be relied upon solely. It might seem excessive, but your backup definitely needs a backup!