Protecting corporate information means designing and implementing a solid backup-and-restore strategy — with many organisations failing to check they can also recover from a breach.
That’s according to an article by backup management and recovery software specialist Macrium, which says organisations should use a 3-2-1 approach to backup to ensure the best chance of successful backup and recovery if the worst happens.
“This rule states that you should have: three copies of your data; two local copies on different storage types; [and] one backup off-site,” the company said.
“The main aim of this strategy is that in the worst case scenario, you will still have at least one copy of your data that can be restored.”
If a laptop is stolen or one storage location catches fire, local backups of data can simply be restored to other hardware.
With products such as Macrium Reflect and Macrium Site Manager, a 3-2-1 strategy can be easily configured, according to the vendor.
For example, by scheduling multiple backups to use different destinations, via a tool like Macrium Reflect’s Alternative Locations feature, in the order desired.
“Future incremental and differential backups will be appended to the backup set that exists on the destination that is being used,” the company said.
Don’t forget to check the relevant destination is accessible from the system at the scheduled backup time, or that relevant USB drives are connected.
Macrium’s Site Manager offering enables users to configure multiple repositories, supporting multiple redundant copies of data on site.
Storage options include Network Share, Amazon AWS Storage Gateway, Azure Storage Account, or a local computer repository. Remote synchronisation enables easy off-site replication – via windows network share, a local path, file transfer protocols and Amazon S3 cloud storage.
“Using a combination of multiple repositories and or remote synchronisation, you can easily configure three copies of your data, including one off-site copy,” Macrium said.
