6 Common Mistakes of Business Backup

According to Contingency Planning and Strategic Research Corporation, 96 percent of all business workstations are not being backed up.

If you are within the small minority that has a disaster recovery plan in place – that’s great! You are ahead of the game.

However, even with a disaster recovery plan, businesses who are making these mistakes could still be putting their data and business at risk.


6 Common Mistakes of Business Backup

1

Only Having One Copy of your Backups

If you only have one copy of your data, you do not have necessary protection against a disaster. Backup experts advise the 3-2-1 rule: 3 copies (server data + two backups) on 2 types of media (i.e. local disk and cloud) with 1 backup located offsite.

2

Not Taking Your Backups Off Site

If you are diligently doing daily backups, but leave them on-site when you go home for the day you are not protecting your data in the event of a disaster. Leaving your backup copy in the same location as your data risks your backup being destroyed along with your server data. Without a visible backup, there will be nothing to restore.

3

Rotating Two Local Backups

If you take your backups offsite with you nightly – nice work! But if you bring it back to the office with you in the morning and a disaster strikes during the daytime, your backup(s) are all in the same place and you may not be able to rescue them. Storing your backups in different locations protects your data in the event of a disaster that takes out your server data and local backup.

4

Not Keeping Full Backups Offsite

If you are using differential with incremental backups, a set is created each backup cycle consisting of one full backup and several incremental and differential backups. What this means is, if you only take one of the incremental/differential backups off site, you will not have a full backup. If a disaster were to occur and your server(s) and onsite backup are destroyed, the backup tape you have may be useless.

5

Using Legacy Backup Only

If your critical systems went down today – how long could you afford to be down before your backup is restored? Minutes? Hours? Days? What about weeks? A legacy backup cannot meet the 99.999% availability requirements that businesses of today require.

6

Not Having a Plan for Holidays and Weekends

Do you have employees working on holidays and weekends while the person(s) responsible for backups only works weekdays? What if that person is ill or on vacation? Do business critical applications run over the weekend when no one is in-house? If a backup fails over the weekend – who is responsible for making sure data is backed up properly? Not having consistent backups in these situations can cause a major data loss!


No one wants to have to worry about the worst-case-scenario, but even more so, no one wants to experience rebuilding their business from the ground. With a survival rate of less than 10%, most companies without an effective disaster recovery plan are forced out of business within 2 years of experiencing major data loss.

Calculate your cost of downtime here.

Having a disaster recovery plan in place is a great first step, but using it effectively can mean the difference between major data loss and a quick recovery.

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