Today, on March 31st, the world of the Internet is celebrating international backup day. Backup is a cornerstone of preventing data loss and everyone should make sure that their data is backed up on external storage, such as external hard drive or the Internet.
30% of people have never backed up, 113 phones are lost or stolen every single minute, 29% of disasters are caused by accident and 1 in 10 computers infected with viruses each month – this shocking statistic should encourage you to back up your data.
Unfortunately, backups can’t ensure the safety of your data completely. You couldn’t say that few years ago, but now in 2017 having a backup is not enough and you should go for additional safety solutions.
Kroll Ontrack made a research on this specific topic and revealed that cloud-based backups are gaining popularity around the world. Researcher have surveyed around 1000 customers and businesses in North America, Australia and Europe – 17 percent of them are backing up data in external hardware (8 percent rise compared to 2016) and even 33 percent of respondents backup data in cloud-based storage (twice as much compared to 2016).
One third of all respondents experienced data loss despite wide possibilities to avoid this happening. Thankfully, only 35 percent of those who experienced data loss didn’t have an active backup. Increasing awareness of the importance of this problem is key both for businesses and regular users. However, 12 percent of them had corrupted backup and 1/4 of them failed to restore any data at all. In addition to that, a lot of respondents revealed that the data restored from backup was not up to date. And this leads to the conclusion that simply backing up your data is not enough these days and this process is not as simple as you would think.
Even though there are plenty of various solutions and services to backup data, users around the globe find it complicated to select right backup technology and setup the service. There are some key moments to make things work:
- Schedule backups. In order to keep backup data up to date, it needs to be updated regularly. It can be difficult to do it manually so the best solution is to set-up automatic updates that can be scheduled according to your needs – once a day, once a week and so on. It’s the only way to assure that your backup data is recent.
- Check backups regularly. You should manually check the backup manually from time to time to make sure that there are no errors and the data is complete.
Finally, hear what some experienced cyber security experts (Jonathan Levine from Intermedia) have to say regarding this topic:
Backup has always been an important part of business continuity plans. Traditional backup solutions, however, don’t back up files in real time. With the emergence of ransomware that threatens to take entire businesses offline for extended periods of time, this limitation has become a critical weakness. Additionally, when companies need to restore their data, they need to do so as quickly as possible. Businesses often forget that it isn’t enough to simply have backups in place, the speed with which they can be accessed and used is just as important.
Any company that hasn’t incorporated off-site, real-time cloud backup with point in time recovery and instant file access into its continuity plans is likely to suffer significant downtime at a huge financial cost should they become victims of ransomware. World Backup Day is an opportunity to educate businesses about the importance of backup and provide basic prevention and containment techniques to avoid downtime in the increasingly likely event that a ransomware attack occurs
