Backup technology has greatly evolved within the last few years, and there are many options available that are cost effective, and easy to manage.

This is part two of a two part series. In part one Backing Up Data – Do You Know What You Don’t Know? we introduced your exposure as a small business owner.

In this part we’ll cover the following topics:

Once you are certain that you are capturing the correct information, what are the time elements related to your backup?

Is your data stored offsite?

How long would it take you to recover from a complete loss of your critical systems?

And next steps…

1.   Once you are certain that you are capturing the correct information, what are the time elements related to your backup?

• How many copies of your data do you keep?  Do you have a daily, weekly, or monthly backup? 
• How often do you make copies of your data?  Can you afford to lose an hour of work?  Or a day of work? 
• How long do you keep the data?  Do you understand for how long you can restore to daily, weekly, or monthly backups? 
• Are there regulations in your industry that require you to maintain copies of your backup for specified amounts of time?

2.   Is your data stored offsite?

• It’s clearly important to backup your data, but it’s equally critical to keep a copy of this information offsite.  If there were a fire, flood, or theft of the server and backup systems were unavailable, how will you restore? 
• Do you keep a copy of this information in an area outside of your office?
• How often is the offsite copy updated?

Next- Recovery time from systems loss. and Are you backing up all your data?