1. No Backup

This is the most obvious, yet the easiest mistake to fix. If you don’t have any kind of backup, you are not alone. As Ponemon Institute reported, 39% of small and medium-sized companies don’t have this covered. Disasters of any sort, whether simple human errors, natural disasters, or ransomware attacks, will affect your business one way or another. There is no knowing how and when a disaster will occur. Fortunately, there is a way to diminish thus negative impact. The first step is to put some backup in place.

2. Physical storage = physical danger

Physical storage, such as discs and tapes, may seem like the most reliable backup system, because they are the only type that is tangible and visible. However, physical storage equals physical dangers, such as fires and floods, and even human error, such as discs breaking, overheating, or being misplaced. Other storage, like the cloud, is intangible. Therefore, it gives an advantage to its users by defying physical disasters.

3. ‘Sync’ vs. ‘Backup’

Many people get confused about syncing and backing-up their data. If you think that by syncing your files and documents you do not need to back them up, you’re wrong! When you ‘sync’ a file, it simply means that if you make any changes in a file on one device, the same changes will be made to a file that is synced to other devices.

4. Consistency is key

The average failure rate when backing up all data is 75%. Installing some kind of data backup system and calling it a day won’t be enough. Backing up data calls for consistency, a thought and a plan. For the average small business, a weekly backup is often enough. Daily backups are recommended for remote work, regular work with client data and/or for businesses in regulated industries. Long story short, the more data produced and the more significant the data is, the more frequent the backups should occur.

5. Check your files

Setting automated backups might help most of the time, but let’s be one step ahead. Incorporate checking saved data to ensure that they are working correctly. Generally, automated processes sometimes end up failing over time – making sure everything is working as it should be is vital.

6. Try it out!

Doing a backup and checking it from time to time are only the first steps. If you can’t restore anything, you’re dead in the water. You need to ensure that those backups will work, if and when you need them.

7. Backup for your backup

Because backups are so critically important, you should construct your backup architecture in a way that avoids (at least as much as possible) having a single point of failure. If possible, have a backup of your backups. You never want to find yourself in a situation in which you did not backup the night before and, you are just praying that the server doesn’t fail that day, because you have nothing to fall back on.

8. Make room for your data

This is another very common mistake; hard drives and cloud drives that are almost completely full. When this happens a backup cannot be fully performed. It is important to always ensure that there is sufficient storage on whatever devices or locations that you use for your critical backups.

9. Neatly organised folders

Cluttered data may not have any impact on your cloud backup process, but it will sure turn into a nightmare when it’s time for a restore. Most of the time, you’ll restore several key files, so you need to be able to find them promptly. As such, you need to sort out your information in easily manageable clusters. The less complex, the better. You need all employees that have access to the backups to find everything as easy as possible.

10. Close your apps before it’s too late

Not every cloud backup service offers the possibility of backing up your files while they’re open. That means if you leave your “in progress” spreadsheets and documents open overnight, your file might not be present in the backup. Now, a single document may not be such a problem, but what if you forget an entire database? Basically, your system has skipped a crucial backup. So, remember to go the extra mile and close such apps.

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