Posted On 26 Jul 2020

Backing up your data is something that we are all constantly told to do, but something that too many of us neglect. Basically, until you lose a significant amount of data, you can’t really imagine what a serious impact it could have on your operations. Lost data from whatever cause can mean many hundreds of hours of work being lost; lost customer data can mean huge amounts of sales can be lost; and many of your employees might be standing idle while you desperately tried to recover data for them to work with.

There are many reasons that data losses occur, accidental deletion, natural disasters affecting data centers, malicious software, or simple deterioration of your data storage devices. To be honest, there is no one absolute guaranteed way to store data that ensures you will never lose it. Malware is continually developing, for example, and you can never predict when the next natural disaster might hit. This means that it’s essential to have a backup and disaster recovery plan.

Your recovery plan should be as robust as possible to deal with every potential scenario. If someone attacks your data with ransomware, encrypting it, and attempting to force you to pay substantial fees for its release, you need to have a clean copy safely stored and ready to replace your corrupted data. If you haven’t taken proper care of this data, you could just make matters worse, for example, if you save a backup copy that has also been infected, you could clear out your system and then return the virus when you reinstall your data.

It’s essential that your backup and disaster recovery plans should be both robust and proactive, because trying to play catch up when data losses or damage occurs will always be unsatisfactory and can actually cause more damage.