These days data backup solutions are a common concern for businesses both small and large. After every natural disaster and after every major data breach, your company should be asking: “Are the backups safe?” This concern is not frivolous. Taking backups of vital data is one of the easiest ways to minimize the damages caused by the natural and man-made disasters your company will face in modern times.

A data backup solution provides a secondary location where your company’s data is held. The standard recommendation is to have one backup solution onsite and one offsite, giving you a comprehensive protection plan for the data that drives your day-to-day operations. The onsite storage option gives you a quick and easy method of retrieving documents that were lost if, for example, an employee deletes a crucial folder or a computer dies and you need to recover a document that was stored on it. Time can often be of the essence in these situations, so having something local and easily accessed can save the day.

Meanwhile, offsite backup solutions represent the more long-term and “big picture” protections that your business should be considering This includes long-term data storage ranging from several months back to a few years. If a large-scale disaster were to strike, like a fire, earthquake, or malware attack, you could lose everything. Having several years of past data available offsite makes it easier to rebuild.

Options for onsite storage are varied but usually follow the same general style. Dedicated Windows servers or Network Attached Storage devices (NAS) such as a Synology or QNAP NAS can be set up to provide network drives that allow employees to easily store projects and important documents on the server. These are typically highly configurable and allow for easy organization and file sharing throughout the whole company while also restricting access to more sensitive files as needed.

Manual storage methods such as external drives are occasionally used in smaller companies, but are best used sparingly for sensitive documents.

Offsite storage methods are a bit more varied. Actively syncing backups such as OneDrive and Dropbox are quite simple to set up. These provide a highly customizable, easy-to-implement backup solution that actively syncs documents to the cloud. These often provide some level of version control. For example, OneDrive allows you to revert documents to any version created within the last 30 days.

Longer term, more large-scale data backup solutions such as Amazon S3 are ideal when paired with an onsite storage method like a Windows server or NAS. These allow you to automatically back up your entire network share drive environment to a highly reliable and generally cost-effective cloud-based server. These enable you to store more snapshots of your files or much larger backups that would not be feasible with other methods.

Before disaster strikes, take some time to back up the data that keeps your organization running. Whether you have an onsite backup solution and are looking for a long-term offsite plan, or your data is still stored in paper files in your office, let our Lehigh Valley IT support and cybersecurity team lend a hand. They’ll not only take backups of your data, but walk you through the most effective backup solutions for your organization.