Three Fundamental Backup Best Practices

Without proper backup practices, an organization cannot ensure the safety of its data. A lack of proper backup strategies leads to data loss, financial loss, and a lack of credibility from users in the event of a disaster. To succeed, businesses must avoid such catastrophes. We’ve put together a list of three fundamental backup best practices to assist in ensuring data protection.

Plan Backup Early

Often, traditional backup is used as the last resort for data recovery in many environments. However, backup is more strategic than that. In terms of data protection, backup falls into line with components such as snapshots, mirrors, and replication. Backup is integral to the process of recovery and restoration and should, therefore, be treated as an essential part of storage and protection plans from the beginning.

Create a Lifecycle Operations Calendar

In order to organize the process of backing up data, organizations would benefit from the use of a lifecycle operations calendar. Certain tasks have to be performed periodically and correctly every day for backup operations to run smoothly. Other tasks don’t have to be completed as frequently, but they are just as vital as the daily tasks. For this reason, establishing a lifecycle operations calendar is a way to make sure all tasks are completed on time and none are forgotten.

Review Backup Logs Daily

While reviewing backup logs every day is time-consuming and tedious, it is a very beneficial practice. In doing so, you will gain an understanding of what standard logs look like, and then have the ability to detect any abnormalities, should they occur. Anomalies in backup logs can be indications of cyber attack attempts. In having an awareness of this, organizations will be able to act against attacks sooner than they would have been able to otherwise.

In implementing these relatively simple practices, organizations will improve their backup operations. The backup process will be more consistent, and those managing it will have a better awareness of it overall.