When is the last time you reviewed your backup plan? If it’s been a while, take some time to look it over and make sure you aren’t making these backup mistakes:

1. Backups too infrequent.

Once a week backups mean losing a lot of data if something goes wrong. Even daily backups may not be often enough for certain applications. Make sure your backup strategy leverages replication where appropriate and combines daily, weekly, and monthly backups to make sure you can quickly access and restore any needed data.

2. Using only one backup device.

If all your backup data is on a single device, if that device fails, all your backup data is lost. Use at least two types of storage to make sure data is protected against that kind of outage.

3. Keeping backups on-site.

Backups need to be quickly accessible, but if your only backups are kept at your primary data center, you’ve got a big risk: loss of that data center means loss of the backups you need for recovery, too. It’s important to keep a backup copy onsite for ease of access, but keep a second backup at another site to protect against total loss.

4. Relying on cloud providers to backup data.

The default data protection from your cloud provider means they can restore your servers to their current state in case of an outage, but they likely don’t keep historical data to help you recover from other kinds of data loss. The cloud environment may also not meet compliance standards. Whether your data is in the cloud or not, you need your own process to back it up and keep it safe.

5. Not making sure your backups work.

Making sure your backup jobs exit with a success code isn’t enough to prove your backups work. For that, you need to ensure you can actually use your backups to restore the data you need. This means doing regular tests to ensure backup media isn’t corrupted and that your staff is familiar with the data recovery process.

6. Backup devices are always connected.

It’s convenient to keep backup devices online and connected all the time, but it isn’t safe. Ransomware will seek out and corrupt any media it can access, including connected backup drives. For better data protection, backup drives should be connected only when they’re actively being used as part of the backup or recovery process.

7. Relying on replication as your backup strategy.

Replication keeps data at the backup site current, but that’s all it does. While this means you have an up-to-the-minute backup, that doesn’t mean you can’t experience data loss: instant replication means any data corruption is instantly replicated, too. Real protection requires backups that keep both recent and historic data available for use in recovery when needed.

8. Not reviewing your backup configurations.

As time goes on, the assumptions underlying backup schedules and configurations change. Small, experimental workloads transform into big, mission critical systems. Backup procedures need to be periodically reviewed to make sure they still provide adequate protection to each system.

9. Not keeping backups long enough.

Is a week long enough to retain a backup? What about a month, or a year? Backup retention policies need to be based on an assessment of each workload’s risks and regulatory requirements.

Are you making any of these backup mistakes? Backup and disaster recovery services from Prescient Solutions help businesses in Chicago and Schaumburg effectively protect their data. Contact Prescient Solutions to learn how to correct these backup mistakes.