Back Your Data Up like a Pro

Protect Data that is Important to You

The process of recovering data is a place that you would never wish to find yourself and the thought alone is enough to make a person anxious. However, whether your data is for personal use, or if you’re a sole trader or company, how can you back your data up like a pro and why should this concern you?

Without a data management plan in place, combined with a lacklustre approach to data backup and data storage, many of us put ourselves in a position of great risk, where we can expect to lose time and money to the process with no promise of a full data recovery. Basically, all the facts point towards the idea that an internal hard-drive on your main computer at home or your laptop at work is just not enough. 

Today the threats are endless and data can be lost in many ways. These range from physical damage to hardware due to floods and fire events, to data corruption, malware, ransomware, and human error. We also can’t forget that there is always the chance of a black swan event, such as the Carrington Event of 1859 when a solar storm wiped out telegraph systems across Europe and North America – lending a frightening insight into what consequences an event like this, and other extreme natural disasters, would have on our lives in this digital age.

The above factors have led to a boom in the data recovery and data storage industries in Australia, as reported by The Australian,  in which the experts are cleaning up financially due to the simple fact that you may not have planned ahead. Such as the case of a traveller who took a trip around the world, accumulating 44GB of photographs only to accidentally delete them all because he thought he had backed up his library of photos.

On a larger scale, in the lead up to Christmas in 2019, a tele-marketing company based in Arkansas, U.S.A was forced to make 300 employees redundant and temporarily close their doors after the company was ‘held hostage’ by a ransomware incident, which left the business massively out of pocket and forced a restructure in order to survive.

Plan Ahead and Explore your Data Backup Options

Fortunately, there are many different hardware and storage media options, as well as cloud storage services available to you in order to build an air-tight data management plan. A widely published approach is the 3-2-1 Backup Rule, which recommends that you maintain at least three backups of your important files using two different on-site storage media and one storage media that is kept off-site.

Storage media options include hardware such as SSD drives, flash drives, USB drives, and your internal hard drive, while off-site locations include online cloud storage services and safety deposit boxes (SDB’s) in a secure storage facility. 

Important considerations surrounding storage media that dictate the capacity of your data backup plan to meet your needs include durability, portability, transfer speeds, storage capacity and first and foremost the security of the hardware.

Depending on the size of your files and whether the documents you store are high impact, you will need to make a decision on the quality of storage media and services you utilise in your 3-2-1 Backup plan based on the nature of the data, the frequency of use of the data, and the sensitivity of the data.

However, in order to preserve documents that are essential to your business or simply important to you, you should remember that at the end of the day on-site storage media are destructible; and while cloud services are great for file sharing and vary in affordability, they too rely on servers in a centralised location – often located off-shore – and are just as susceptible to destruction, theft and corruption as your internal storage media.

Safe Deposit Boxes and your Data Backup Plan

The above is why individuals and business owners are advised to take advantage of all facets of data management and storage. It is recommended that you to take the extra step to protect highly important documents that are essential to the continuation and wellbeing of your business, or an important part of your life story. Make copies of important documents for sharing, have them witnessed and signed by a Justice of the Peace for validity, and move them off-site where they are out of harms way and may be accessed later at your convenience.

At Private Vaults Australia, we provide the ultimate off-site solution for your data backup plan, offering safe deposit boxes in a world-class, flood-free and fireproof secure facility to individuals and enterprises who mean business and are serious about protecting what is valuable to them. 

For more info on how to back your data up like a pro, contact PVA or read the PVA blog for more interesting news, tips and ideas to guide you.