Today, let’s talk about Backup and Disaster Recovery planning.
Data loss can be crippling to any business. It’s imperative to have a reliable backup and disaster recovery plan in place at all times.
Often, we trust that backups are just happening. Someone is swapping backup tapes, or hard drives on a routine basis. We know that the backup software is set up and working. We even see the successful backup jobs in the backup logs and reports. Or maybe you just assume you’ll never have to worry about data loss because you’ve never had an issue before.
Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.
So, let’s talk about six essential items you should use to structure and implement a good backup and disaster recovery plan.
1. Determine your data loss tolerance.
Determining data loss tolerance is your first step to designing a proper backup plan. What we are looking for here is how many days, hours, or minutes of data can you afford to lose from a data loss event. From there, the amount and size of the data to be backed up will determine the technology and costs needed to meet that backup window.
2. Determine your acceptable recovery time-frame.
There is no question that downtime costs us money, so we want to minimize it any way we can. Typically the shorter your recovery window, the more your backup and disaster recovery solution is going to cost. It’s really about finding the right balance based on your specific recovery requirements and budget.
3. Store your data in multiple locations, on and off-site.
Make sure you double up here. We recommend both local and cloud backup repositories, or at minimum some form of offsite rotation on disks or tapes. Local copies provide very quick restore times, where your cloud storage adds a barrier of protection for when your data gets compromised with something like a crypto locker virus or intentional, and unintentional tampering, such as file deletion.
4. Understand your data retention period and any regulatory compliance your industry might have for archival data retention.
For most backup plans, we typically recommend two weeks retention at the minimum, with archiving monthly and yearly. This retention schedule provides a good cushion when it’s time to restore recent or older data sets. Again, your data retention options will be a balance of the amount of data, type of media, and total budget for your backup solution.
5. Test your restores once a month.
I can’t tell you how many times over the years a backup system looks like it’s working, but when you go to restore the data, the data itself or the media it’s on is corrupt. So make sure someone is testing a restore at least once a month.
6. Document and test your DR plan.
Know the who, what, when, and where of your disaster recovery plan. Have a written logical procedure ready to follow that everyone involved understands. Hold a disaster recovery fire drill and run your DR plan through its paces once a year.
Once again. The six key areas of a solid DR plan are;
1. Determine your data loss tolerance.
2. Determine your acceptable recovery time-frame.
3. Store your data in multiple locations, on and off-site.
4. Understand your data retention period.
5. Test your restores once a month.
6. Document and test your disaster recovery plan.
We hope this video helps you and your team craft a solid disaster recovery plan, or maybe just use these points review the one you currently have in place.
If you have any questions or would like a free consultation, you can always call Bitboyz at 216-539-9655 or email us at info@trnsfrm.tech.
We hope you enjoyed the video and thanks for watching.