As a small business owner, your most important asset is your business data. It is literally the life blood of your business especially if you have been in business for a while. Hardware failures and natural disasters happen more often than you realize and you have to be able to recover from them as fast as possible.
Backing up your business data gives you the ability to recover from disaster and keeps you in business. I usually tell my clients to think of data backup like their home or rental insurance. You might never have to use but you will be happy you have it if the situation ever arises. There are different forms of data backup you can implement for your business.
Local Data Backup
This is the simplest and oldest form of data backup. It could be as simple as backing up to an external hard drive or USB stick or implementing a full tape backup system. This is also the fastest form of data backup; you can backup as much data and as often as you want. You are only limited by the size of your backup device. Every business should at least implement something as simple as this. The major downside of a local backup is the safety of the local device in the event of theft, disaster or failure.
Online/Cloud Data Backup
With cloud backup another company handles the transmission and storage of your data. Your data is backed up to the hard drives of the company providing the service. The data is transmitted to the company over the internet and it is encrypted during transmission and at rest. Your data is always secure in the cloud no matter what happens at your place of business. The major disadvantage of cloud backup is the speed of data backup and recovery. This is usually not a problem when you are backing up your data but restoring your data can take days depending on the size of your data and speed of your internet connection.
Hybrid Data Backup
Hybrid data backup gives you the best features of the other two forms of backup and also stores your data in multiple places so you are more protected. It gives you the speed of a local backup and the safety of a cloud backup. You get a storage device that data is constantly backed up locally and later uploaded to the cloud. This is currently the form of backup we recommend to our client. We can even bring up a copy of your server in cloud within minutes so you be back in business in the event of a disaster.
Whatever form of backup you employ, it is only as good as the data recovery. The only way you can guarantee your data recovery is through testing. We schedule monthly data recovery test for our clients. This guarantees we can readily restore the data if needed. The worst thing that can happen is to find out your backup has not been working when you need it.