Testing Your Data Backup and Recovery Plan
Most business owners are aware of the need for data backup. Yet having a backup system in place isn’t enough: it’s important also to test them. But testing Backup and Disaster Recovery (DR) systems is often overlooked. However, it’s a key business procedure that helps to prevent data loss and damages to your brand’s reputation. With backup and recovery tests, your organizational data is protected and can be restored as quickly as possible in the event of an unwanted incident.
Top reasons to backup your data
The many reasons to establish data backups include:
Data loss prevention: Protecting against natural or man-made disasters (including hardware failures and system outages, power or network disruption, flooding or fire, hacker or insider attack)
Tax reporting, audits, and archives: Save financial and accounting data for tax reporting; ensuring compliance with financial and other industry standards
Preserving relationships with clients: Saved client information builds trust and value for a company
Reducing downtime: Good backups will keep downtime to a minimum both by preserving your data and by saving time wasted on recovery.
Improving productivity: With existing backed up files, companies improve productivity by reducing wasted time
Establishing credibility with customers, investors, and employees: In the end, data backup is necessary to save the business from losing investors and customers and closing down.
We recommend backing up in three places. You might have one on a local, on-site computer. You’d also have a backup on a remote device and another in the cloud. The cloud option gives you the most flexibility. It can be accessed from anywhere, regardless of conditions in your particular environment.
Backups, however, only protect the business if they work. This makes it vital for organizations to tests backups, and do so regularly.
Testing Data Backups
Regular data backups can offer peace of mind, but you’ll really know you are ready to go if you regularly test your ability to recover your system from a backup.
Testing your backup lets you verify the necessary data is available for recovery. Plus, testing helps you learn how to actually implement recovery following a data loss. If a backup test fails, you can take the steps needed to ensure you don’t actually lose valuable information. Otherwise, you’re throwing money at storage space and backup services that are no help, and you’ll find out too late.
Regular monitoring helps you keep track of any software or hardware changes that may have an impact on data backups. Via testing, you might also learn some staff members are storing data somewhere that isn’t being backed up, and you can now intervene with those employees or extend your backup protocols to prevent that data getting lost.
Scheduling data backup tests can also help you to identify a misconfiguration in the backup software or ways in which you’re not adequately addressing your backup needs. For instance, you might not have set up a complete backup in the first place. This might mean you’re backing up the data but not the settings. Most backup software will send error messages if there was an issue backing up. Still, they’re easy for an overworked IT team to miss.
Actively testing backups allows the business to confirm fallback data accuracy and effectiveness. Additionally, you’ll be able to gauge:
How long it takes to perform the backup
Any issues that arise during recovery
What steps need to be taken to address those problems
All of this is something you want to consider proactively. Some people say they work best under pressure, but most of us think more clearly and perform better if not in the midst of a data catastrophe.
A managed service provider, or MSP, can help your business with data backup and recovery testing. Our IT experts can monitor for failures and make any changes needed to get the backup running properly again. You’ll be glad you did recovery testing in advance when things run smoother and quicker in the midst of your disaster recovery.
Give us a call at 305 400 0992 to correct your backups, make sure they are working, and set up regular backup restore tests.