We hate to blatantly promote our own services in a blog, but here we are. We’ve been looking at some stats and helping a lot of clients lately with a proper backup strategy, because, well obviously it’s essential! Around 50% of businesses don’t seem to have a proper backup in place and have lost data in one way or another, which can obviously be debilitating.
We absolutely recommend a 3-2-1 backup strategy, meaning you have three copies of your data if something were to go wrong. So, put simply, you will have 2 local copies, one on your system or on your local drive and one on an external hard drive. Lastly, and where our shameless promotion comes into play, is a third copy using an online backup, like our IQPC Cloud Safe option.
So the 3-2-1 rule simply means, three copies of your data on two different media with one copy off-site. It should be fairly easy to work out the first two copies, but the way an online back up works is that your data is automatically backed up to a private and secure data centre (like the one at IQPC). It’s safe, encrypted and ready to restore if disaster were to strike!
Why should we have two on-site and one off-site?
Having a backup on-site is a quick and easy way to retrieve lost data, as long as you have a regular backup schedule in place. For example, the hard drive on your laptop might crash and you’ll still be able to access your data while it’s getting fixed or replaced.
An off-site option is required, due to the more gloomy things like theft or fire occurring. If your two local copies are kept in close proximity, then the risk of them both being compromised at once, is a lot higher.
There is never going to be a 100% guarantee that all of your data will be safe forever, but you should do a check to see how up to date your system is. Or better yet, get us to do it … nothing creates more urgency than getting someone else check to see if everything is in order.
If you’d like more information about the IQPC Cloud Safe service, please let us know 😉
