Hello readers,

This month in “Tech Tips & Bits for Small Business” I’m going to focus on the importance of data backup. It’s important to have your organization’s data backed up, and you need to know how to restore that data when an incident arises. Notice I said when, not if.

Why does any of this matter? Aside from its employees, the data a company generates over the years is one of its most important assets. Would you still be in business if all that hard work disappeared overnight?

Given the high stakes, I wouldn’t suggest placing complete reliance on a single external hard drive, which you might happen to remember to copy some of your data over to, periodically. Plus, an external drive will only back up the files you transfer, and there are multiple localized risks which can cause a mass data loss incident. A natural disaster such as fire or tornado can occur. An unscrupulous person can steal your equipment, or maybe a disgruntled employee intentionally deletes their files before leaving the company. Someone might even clean out their email account and any files stored within it. In the aftermath, you will likely need to restore this information quickly.

The “3-2-1” rule is commonly referenced in the IT industry. It suggests you should have three copies of your data. Two copies should be on separate types of storage media, and one copy should be off-site. The process can be complex, but with the right technical knowledge and services in place, this can be a helpful strategy to keep your data available. Some cloud backup services can even “spin up” virtual machines (computers based in the cloud), running copies of your backed-up data, in case you need to access that information immediately, rather than waiting for replacement hardware and the process of restoring data onto it.

For email backup, services exist that can integrate with and automatically back up most of your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace account data at regular intervals. I highly recommend doing this.

Whether you are backing up computer or server data, or your email account data, be sure you have a plan in place for how to restore that information in case it’s necessary to do so.

Thanks for reading, and if you have any specific questions or topics you’d like covered, don’t hesitate to contact me or my Effingham County, Georgia based team.

Glen Montgomery, 

CEO, RepowerIT