How Often Should You Back Up Your Data?

Backing up data as a part of your organization’s insurance policy or industry regulations entails more than just making a copy of everything. When designing an effective data center backup strategy, you should take yourself through a journey with the Five Ws and H:

• Who? – Managing data backup in-house or working with a vendor?
• What? – Backing up all of your organization’s data, or only the most vital? What about endpoint data?
• Where? – Storing backups on-premise or off-site?
• When? – How often are you backing up your data?
• Why? – In-house security policies or legal obligations or both?
• How? – Traditional backup or via the cloud?

While much attention is given to the who, what, where, why, and how of data backup, not as much attention is given to the “when”, or when you should perform backups, and how often they should be done. It’s easy to take the importance of this question for granted, especially when you’re working with a data center backup vendor who offers management of the service.

However, it is becoming common for vendors in this space to provide users with the choice of how often their data is backed up. Data loss can occur at any time, so it’s important to be mindful of just how often you should back up new data as a preventive measure.

Factors to Consider

Even if you’re a seasoned IT professional, this can still present you with a few questions. According to Microsoft, some important questions you should ask yourself when determining a cadence for backup are:

• How important is the data on your systems?
• What type of information does the data contain?
• How often does the data change?
• How quickly do you need to recover the data?
• Do you have the equipment to perform backups?
• Who will be responsible for the backup and recovery plan?
• What is the best time to schedule backups?
• Do you need to store backups off-site?

However, many data center backup experts identify one of these questions as being the most crucial: how often does your data change? Almost every organization today is in the business of creating new content. Whether it’s blog posts, emails, consumer data, or policy documents, new data is being created every day, almost every minute. With this in mind, organizations need to stay on top of backing up all this new data.

Many IT professionals get a little nervous about this topic, given that some data center backup products charge per backup. For example, Cloudways charges per GB of backup storage and per the frequency and retention of clients’ backups. While smaller organizations will do fine with a standard incremental backup every 24 hours with a weekly full backup, enterprises typically require a higher frequency. You can find out more about data centers here.

Backup Recommendations

You can apply quite of bit of nuance, dependent on your organization’s situation. The average mid-size company will benefit from performing a full backup every 24 hours, with an incremental backup every 6 hours.

Smaller companies can often be tempted to store files on flash drives, Google Drive, and physical discs. While physical backups are fantastic for a small amount of data, these methods have serious limitations. Physical systems can be damaged. A fire or flood can wipe out a room of your small business, and suddenly you have lost everything. There is a difference in strategy and impact of disaster recovery compared to backup, which is detailed in the video below.

Circumstances where disaster recovery is needed often have the simplest solutions fail. Google drive and Dropbox are fantastic for cloud storage, but they are not backup centers. These store individual copies, and it is possible to be locked out. This opens up more room for human error.

Furthermore, most file types will not automatically update, and many data types are not commonly stored on systems. While this is better than the cardinal sin of data storage, the worryingly common single “data spreadsheet,” they are not suitable for most professional use cases.

Businesses such as mid-size online retailers will want to increase their incremental backups to 4 hours in addition to producing transaction logs on an hourly basis. Transaction logs are files that list any changes to your database (in this case, new purchases) and are necessary for maintaining the integrity of your database, so they are crucial to an effective backup strategy.

If you want to take a more aggressive approach, you can perform a full backup every 24 hours while doing incremental backups every 3 hours and transaction logs at least every half-hour. This scenario works best for data systems that see a lot of traffic, such as those belonging to enterprise online retailers and large banks.

With these businesses, lost transactions are just not an option. Given that backing up this frequently can be quite the load on storage capabilities, it is recommended to invest in a secondary server in this scenario.

No matter what frequency you choose, it’s also important to consider whether or not your backups will be performed automatically or manually. Scheduling automatic backups is one way to save your IT team time. Automating backups means your team can spend time focused on other crucial tasks.

Database Backup Software Options

When looking at software solutions on how to backup data and manage important files, there are two broad types of software. The first is Data Center Backup, the second is far more comprehensive than these simpler backup solutions in Database Management.

Data Center Backup software

The best data center backup tools can ensure a smooth backup process for business data, and minimize human error. These mitigate the risks of a single, physical location of storage, and offer many of the convenient features above.

There are many options available to users, but the TrustRadius Top-Rated award winners are Rubrik, Veeam Backup and Replication, and Commvault Complete Data Protection.

While all these are capable, Veeam is a fantastic choice for many use cases. Users have access to a free trial and on-premise models with flat pricing structures. This is well-suited to those new to backup solutions.

Competitive data center backup products will provide users with features like automated backup which they can schedule to their liking, but this is not a feature available across the board. When on the market for this type of software, be sure to confirm whether this is a supported capability.

Your needs will vary massively based on the size of your organization, data security needs, and storage space required. Click below to use the TrustRadius Trustmap to filter reviews by the company sizeto find the one best suited to you.

https://www.trustradius.com/data-center-backup  BUTTON

Database Management

Database management, as the name suggests, involves organizing your data by a  variety of characteristics. These tools often include some form of data recovery system. If you find that you are needing such organizational functionality, it may be time to check out these options.

For a full list of the benefits of Database management, check out the post below

For those already well versed in database management and ready to look for options, you’re in luck. Below is a list of the best free database management software.

More Resources

If you’d like to take a deeper diver into data center backup software, take a look at our new Data Center Backup Buyer’s Guide. It is a great place to start to find more information about specific solutions, compare products head-to-head, and see what your fellow IT professionals have to say.