Backing up is good, restoring is better!
Backing up your company's data is a real issue. Because of their confidentiality, and above all because they are essential to your business. So the question of how to restore it in the event of an incident needs to be addressed. Read all our tips on backup.
Which backup will be able to restore the data?
Free software and its limitations
It's true that there are free online backup solutions. But are they reliable? Given that you haven't paid for anything, it wouldn't be shocking if, in the event of an incident, the publisher denied all responsibility. Take a look at their General Terms and Conditions (GTC) and deduce what would happen in the event of data loss: a priori not much, at least nothing guaranteed. Which isn't very reassuring.
Physical backup: anything but invincible
You really want to put your data in a safe place, so that you can retrieve it whatever happens. So should you rely solely on physical back-ups? Like external hard disks or local servers? It's the same as putting your valuables in a safe deposit box at the bank: sometimes the bank gets robbed.
Rely on people outside the problem
If nothing is secure, what can you do? Many companies are tempted to rely on their service providers, although not necessarily the right ones. A chartered accountant, for example, has access to all your accounting and financial data, but can he guarantee that it will be safeguarded? Answer: no. He simply has access, but will not take steps to protect it. For the excellent reason that it is neither his role nor his expertise, however trustworthy he may be.
So who can you turn to?
Dedicated publishers
When the stakes are high, you need to turn to a professional, in this case a service provider specialising in online backup. There is a charge for this service, and it comes with guarantees. The publisher undertakes to protect and restore your data, and will be held liable if necessary.
A commitment to responsibility
Backup solution providers often display their DRP: Disaster Recovery Plan. Expressed in hours, this is the maximum time you would need to be back up and running. This is a good indicator for assessing their responsiveness, and for gauging the potential damage suffered in the event of a temporary interruption to access to your data.
Confidence-building measures
While this DRP is a way for publishers to differentiate themselves and enhance the value of their service offering, it is also a guarantee. If, for example, the response time turns out to be longer than announced, you could legitimately make a claim based on the damage suffered.
What restorations are possible?
Full or latest versions
The wisest way to carry out your back-ups is to do two: one physical and one online. And it's a good idea to make them complementary: do local versioning - when your backups increment each other - and keep only one online version: the most recent, for example.
Restore all or part of your data
By distributing your backups, you balance the risk. Now what happens if something goes wrong? Depending on your publisher, the restoration procedure will be more or less immediate and/or reliable. If you have only lost part of your data, initiating a global recovery protocol would be disproportionate. It would be unnecessarily time-consuming and would also delay your productivity. That's why solutions like Beemo2Cloud allow you to tailor your recovery to the situation at hand. This makes it possible to recover lost data in a very short time.
Plan for as many scenarios as possible
There are many different types of risk:
- hacking or viruses on the cloud side
- material damage such as fire or flooding on the physical back-up side.
To protect yourself as much as possible against these risks, choose a service provider that provides for as many of them as possible. The various data restoration scenarios should cover as wide a range as possible. With some providers, such as Beemo2Cloud, you are supplied with a box that serves as a local backup. So if you need to, you can carry out a manual data recovery yourself. Alternatively, a copy of the cloud backup can be sent to you as quickly as possible by the publisher.
When it comes to backing up and protecting data, the issue of data recovery should not be overlooked. You don't think about it until everything's going well, and then you're stunned by the first incident. Rather than letting uncontrolled risks threaten your organisation's productivity, arm yourself with a reliable solution that will make a black-and-white commitment to do what needs to be done should the need arise. Beemo2Cloud, mentioned here, is particularly well suited to this approach.
Article translated from French