Backup: Why Is Having a Backup So Important?

With the increase in cyberattacks and ransomware, maintaining a backup of your business is extremely important. Hackers and malicious attackers go out of their way to copy your information. Or worse: steal it, and leave you without resources or important assets for your business. How can we face these situations? Backups have become the best way to recover from an attack that destroys your information.

What is a Backup?

A data backup is a process by which we duplicate important data. This duplicate enables recovery of the set after an event or data loss. There are currently many data backup services that businesses and organizations can use. Having a backup ensures that data is safe and critical information is not lost. This applies to natural disasters, data theft, or any other type of emergency.

There are currently different methods for backing up. Previously, the data from the hard disk was downloaded to a set of memories or external disks. Now, with the development of new technologies like wireless systems, IT managers can make these copies remotely. It is also possible to download large amounts of data on small portable devices. Of course, cloud services and related options also facilitate remote data storage. The important thing is not the method; rather, the data is safe if an entire facility or location is compromised.

Making a Safety Plan

Planning how you will perform a backup is as important as implementing it. There are many considerations to take into account when planning this type of backup. Of course, your priorities will change depending on what your company does. However, there are different general details to take into account when planning:

· What data (files, folders, etc.) are a priority.

· What will be the compression method to use.

· How often will your copies run?

· What kind of copies are most needed.

· On what type of media will they be stored.

· Where to store the data for safekeeping.

Let’s analyze some of these data:

Prioritizing Your Data

The main rule is that any data that cannot be easily replaced should be backed up. We talk about any word processing document, spreadsheets, financial databases, customers, etc. Personal files like pictures, music, and emails are important, but in the background. One recommendation is to make backup copies of programs or system folders. For these cases, the ideal is to reinstall them so that the system folders can be restored from your operating system. In this context, it is recommended that you save the program installation discs, operating system, and registry information.

Frequency in Copies

This will depend on how often your business data changes. Business data that changes frequently require daily or hourly copies. The data that changes every certain number of days can be done weekly or even monthly. For the data that is most important to you, you can configure your software to perform custom backups.

Where Should You Save Your Backups?

Cloud: The easy answer is that you can save that backup to whatever file storage media you have available. The most common examples would be a local hard drive, an external hard drive, etc. In these cases, a good practice for storing backups is to keep a copy on-site for easy access.

Also having one off-site in case of an accident or flood that could damage or destroy the physical copy is important. It goes without saying that they should not be stored on the same hard drive as the files you are copying.

However, the best options these days are remote copies. Also known as online backup, this secondary server is hosted by a third-party service provider. Charging for backup varies based on storage space, transmission bandwidth, users, etc. Data backup in the cloud reinforces your data protection strategy without increasing your workload. This labor-saving benefit can be significant and offset the costs associated with copying to the cloud.

Operation of Security Consoles

As we already mentioned, there is much software focused on protecting your backups. The variety of options they offer is very high; For this reason, we will focus on one of the most sought after on the market: Rapid7. So we can evaluate its functions and get an idea of ​​how much we can do with this software.

The Rapid7 Security Console features a built-in database backup feature. This allows you to run manually or based on a schedule set by yourself. Additionally, these backups can restore data from a new or existing host. Additionally, this security console also allows you to configure retention settings.

So you can protect the data stored as a result of your generated scans and reports. The data retention setting allows the console to purge data that exceeds a specified time. This optimizes the performance of the console and saves disk space.

The data storable by this console include:
· The content of the database itself.

· Configuration files nsc.xml, nse.xml, userdb.xml, and consoles.xml

· Licenses

· Images

· Custom report templates

· Custom scan templates

· Reports generated

· Personalized risk strategies

· Custom SCAP data

· Scan logs

This security console also provides an overview of standalone and standard backups and data maintenance mode. You can also generate a pre-backup checklist to ensure everything is in order.

Learn about powerful antivirus with data recovery software.