Why You Should Back Up Your Marketing Data

Data backup is crucial in protecting your company’s information and integrity. Imagine your computer or device crashes or is stolen, your data gets corrupted, and you don’t have a backup. Everything is completely gone. Sure, there are potential recovery options, but they’re never 100% guaranteed and can cost a considerable amount.

You must ensure that your files are always available and accessible, no matter the situation. Otherwise, you risk losing work, productivity, customers, and revenue.

There are several factors and methods of data backup. A good backup strategy has three parts: the actual backups, disaster recovery, and business continuity/quick recovery.

So, how do you create a backup strategy? Start with these four steps.

The first step in creating a backup strategy is answering the following questions:

These are all important questions to ask yourself when creating a backup plan. The basic rule for business data protection is that if losing a set of data will interfere with doing business, back it up.

That means you should always have a backup of your backup. The first data backup is likely stored on your internal hard drive. The second could be stored on an external hard drive. The third could be stored in the cloud. This is how I back up all of my data.

Most people who don’t back up their information generally keep it on their local laptop or desktop drive. The benefits of local storage include quick and easy access and complete control over your data. The very obvious downside to this, however, is that if your computer crashes, breaks, or is stolen, you have no method of recovering your information.

Mac users’ favorite method of local backup would be Time Machine. Time Machine saves one “snapshot” of your startup disk approximately every hour and keeps it for 24 hours.

Hardware is commonly used for backing up data. They can be dedicated solely to backups, whether on an external hard drive, network-attached storage, or USB drive. The downside of external hardware is that your data will be lost if it crashes, gets stolen, or is destroyed. Examples of hardware storage include:

Online storage and backup services are the new waves of data backup. The cloud is a convenient, affordable, and easy-to-maintain option. You can quickly and easily access, back up, and recover storage and data. Some cloud providers even offer backup automation, making the entire process much easier. There are, of course, downsides to the cloud. These include:

No matter what, you should have an offsite backup. If you were to store your laptop (local) and external hard drive (on-site) at the same location and that location experiences a robbery or disaster, all of your information is gone forever.

Dropbox

Backblaze

Carbonite

pCloud

These free options are decent if you don’t have much data to store or back up.

There are other kinds of off-site backups, not including storage within the Cloud. These could include:

Don’t forget to factor in disaster recovery. If your building burns down or floods and your data is only locally hosted, your data is gone. This is another reinforcement of the 3–2–1 Rule.

Your asset recovery plan should include the following:

If your recovery is crucial and timely, ask yourself what the minimum amount of time you need is and how much downtime is acceptable.

Backing up and testing each backup should be an ongoing task. Each test should verify the following:

One way to make testing easier is to set testing dates. Pick a day once a week or once a month to back up, depending on your needs.

Data loss and downtime are detrimental and can bring a company to its knees. This is why data backup should be your number one priority. Creating a backup system that regularly backs up your data protects yourself and your business. You can never have too many backups.

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