7 Worst Practices of Small Business Data Backup

As a small business owner or manager, you probably know it’s important to back up your data. But if you’re like a majority of small businesses, your backup strategy may be woefully inadequate, making your company vulnerable to data loss that could devastate your business.

If your company regularly backs up at least some of its critical data, you may believe that’s enough to protect against data loss. But is it really? Consider these seven all-too-common worst practices for backing up business data. If any of these occur at your company, it’s time to take action to assess and bolster your company’s backup scheme.

• Failing to encrypt data on hard drives. Encrypt your computers’ hard drives with software that uses the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), or consider investing in self-encrypting hard drives.
• Taking home critical business data on a removable drive. If your backup plan is to store company files on a flash drive or in a box of DVDs in a drawer at home, you’re putting critical company data at great risk of loss or theft.
• Making only one backup copy — and storing it onsite. Your backups are stored in a locked office closet. But an onsite disaster such as a flood or fire could wipe out your entire set of backed-up data.
• Backing up the wrong data. You’ve set up a backup — but with incorrect parameters, so that either the wrong data or an incomplete set of data is backed up.
• Relying solely on tape backup. Tape is a high-capacity, economical backup medium — but it shouldn’t be your sole backup method. Only half of all tape backups restore successfully, according to Gartner, and restores from tape backups are slower than from other backup methods.
• Failing to do test restores on backed-up data. You back up your server like clockwork, but those backups won’t do you any good if you haven’t verified that you can fully restore the data.
• Backing up data sporadically — or not at all. If you back up occasionally (or worse, never back up), you’re essentially playing roulette with your company’s data. It’s not a matter of if, but when, that data will be damaged or destroyed by a disk failure or another mishap.

You now know the worst data-backup practices — so what is the right way to back up your data? The easy way — with Affinity Backup Solutions for Business. With this secure, cloud-based backup plan, you don’t have to worry about data security, scheduling backups, restores, or any other backup hassles. We even offer services to sync files and allow file sharing among your team members. Our solutions are easy to use and ensure that your company’s valuable data is always backed up, secure, and available to you.

[cta]Need reliable, hassle-free backup for your business? Affinity has the solution. Learn more — contact Affinity Network Solutions by email or call us at (888) 682-8999.[/cta]