As an I.T administrator protecting your organization’s data is essential, so you need to do it right especially when it comes to data backup. Doing it the wrong way may paint you as incompetent or worse even cost you your job. Large organizations use lots off data for their everyday task from spreadsheets, reports, transactions to analytics. Therefore stay informed on how to protect your organizations data. Here is what you need to avoid doing as you perform your data backups.
Backing up data on the same hard drive
You may get away with this for a while but that is very dangerous. Why would you do that anyway? It’s not really a backup, it’s just a copy of the files in a different folder. Please use a different medium to back up your files for example an external hard drive, a flash drive or at least a disc (though I wouldn’t recommend it either, it may get scratched or broken). A partition of the same drive is not good either.
Why is this wrong?
Well if your hard drive crashes or malfunctions, there goes your original data and your backup files. It will not affect the single partition but it affects all partitions of the hard drive. If your computer gets infected with a virus, you might also lose everything.
Relying on single data backup
It’s good to have a backup, but just because it’s a backup doesn’t mean its immune to the technical and physical hazards that may happen to your primary storage device. Don’t rely on the sole back up. If possible, add another layer to protecting the data by making sure you maintain an online data backup. With the increase in computing resources, storage and internet connections getting cheaper, you can find really cheap online data storage services. These are very helpful as they can be accessed from anywhere and are not prone to onsite hazards. For example, you can use Onedrive, Googledrive or dropbox which offer free gigabytes of data storage which can be increased for a low cost.
Unorganized backups
The whole point of backing up files is so that you can restore them when there is need or if something was to go wrong with the original data. So you need to have orderly backups so that you know what is what when you need to restore and so you know which one to use. Are your backups properly named? If you use professional software, it may automatically organize and name your backups. On the other hand if you do it manually you may have to manually organize the backups make sure you include time stamps. This will help you know which back up is the right one if there are multiple backups.
Not properly storing data backups
So you have backed your data and you leave the external hard drive lying around. If there is an accident, a fire or liquid somehow gets into it your backup medium you lose the data. Even worse, someone who is curious and likes snooping like me may borrow it permanently without you knowing and poof the data is gone. I am not a thief though just an example. So you need to protect your backups not only from virus corruption and other technical problems but also from the physical elements.
Backing up data manually
Well this is not as a bad if you remember to do it as often as it should be done. I include it here simple because there is a better way of doing. If you are an I.T administrator you need to move with the time otherwise you will always be playing catch up. The better and efficient way is using software to automatically back up your data at specific intervals. Anyway why on earth would you do it that way. There are a number of tools you can use to do data backups. Personally I use Dell backup and recovery for my personal computer but there are other tools out there with different capabilities and functionalities.Basically it’s up to you to find which one you like and use. As humans we are not perfect we tend to forget some of these things especially when things become hectic at work. Besides it is tiresome and time consuming to do the same monotonous task of performing data backups day. So work smart let your computer do it for you.