It’s pretty simple: You need to back up your data regularly. When you’ve set up that back up schedule, you should figure out a way to back up your data again. After you’ve got a couple current backups of your files, you should consider backing up your backups off-site. It seems silly to think of backing up backups, but if anything happens — failed drives, theft, fire, flood, etc. — those backups could be lost forever, and if you’ve ever lost a significant amount of data due to a hard drive failure or experience like mine, you know that backups are worth their weight in gold.

Admittedly, there is a point of diminishing return when it comes to how much redundancy is needed — it’s not worth the time/effort/cost to back up your backups ad infinitum — so here are the best practices I’ve come up with over the course of my career in the information technology industry:

• Plan and schedule regular backups to keep your archives current. If your laptop’s hard drive dies, having backups from last June probably won’t help you as much as backups from last night.
• Make sure your data exists on three different mediums. It might seem unnecessary, but if you’re already being intentional about backing up your information, take it one step further to replicate those backups at least one more time.
• Something might happen to your easy onsite backups, so it’s important to consider off-site backups as well. There are plenty of companies offering secure online backups for home users, and those are generally easy to use (even if they can be a little slow).
• Check your backups regularly. Having a backup is useless if it’s not configured to back up the correct data and running on the correct schedule.
• RAID is not a backup solution. Yes, RAID can duplicate data across hard drives, but that doesn’t mean the data is “backed up” … If the RAID array fails, all of the hard drives (and all of the data) in the array fail with it.

It’s important to note here that “off-site” is a pretty relative term when it comes to backups. Many SoftLayer customers back up a primary drive on their server to a secondary drive on the same server (duplicating the data away from the original drive), and while that’s better than nothing, it’s also a little risky because it’s possible that the server could fail and corrupt both drives. Every backup product SoftLayer offers for customers is off-site relative to the server itself (though it might be in the same facility), so we also make it easy to have your backup in another city or on a different continent.

As I’ve mentioned already, once you set up your backups, you’re not done. You need to check your backups regularly for failures and test them to confirm that you can recover your data quickly in the event of a disaster. Don’t just view a file listing. Try extracting files or restore the whole backup archive. If you’re able to run a full restore without the pressure of an actual emergency, it’ll prove that you’re ready for the unexpected … Like a fire drill for your backups.

Setting up a backup plan doesn’t have to be scary or costly. If you don’t feel like you could recover quickly after losing your data, spend a little time evaluating ways to make a recovery like that easy. It’s crazy, but a big part of “risk management,” “disaster recovery” and “business continuity” is simply making sure your data is securely backed up regularly and available to you when you need it.

Plan, prepare, back up.

-Lyndell