Data Backup and Recovery Strategy for Small Business

Life is Unpredictable

Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed a digital transformation of practically every aspect of our lives. Technology moves at an impossible pace, and if you blink, yours will be obsolete! Many small business owners are just trying to find some simple solutions like a successful data backup strategy. If you’ve ever lost data, you probably realize the importance of critical data protection. In order to have a good backup solution, you first have to have a good backup strategy. So let’s get started!

Data Backup Strategy

A great data backup strategy starts with a good backup plan, as it is an essential part of a disaster recovery plan as well. It’s important to first note, in the event of data loss, to recover data you must first be doing regular data backups. We recommend an image-based offsite data backup.

Image-Based Offsite Data Backup

An image-based offsite data backup contributes to true business continuity as it backs up the operating system and the programs and the files simultaneously. With this type of backup, you can restore, when needed, file by file, or an entire folder or a complete restore, depending on what you need. And you’ll get an email confirmation daily letting you know that it has run as intended, so no wondering or worrying about your data backups any longer.

Below are the key features of our image based backup service:

Image-based backups include not just data, but programs and settings, too
Your important data is stored in a world-class data center.
Everything that is backed up is encrypted so you can rest assured it’s secure and only accessible by you
Because it’s in the cloud, your data is always available, no matter where you are
We monitor the software to ensure it is always working
Since the solution creates backups in terms of changes, you will be able to recover even older revisions of files
Detailed daily reports will let you know that your backups are occurring so you can breathe easy knowing your data is protected.
Restore an individual file, or perform a full restore
Supreme flexibility; recover your data from multiple points in time
Complete a bare metal restore to dissimilar hardware, if needed
A fully managed backup system without a capital purchase
Ensure business continuity with quick restores
Works well, regardless of the business environment

These backups achieve a compression rate of around 60% on average, and we can customize the length of the retention period for your needs.

Often times, we seed load the initial backup to get it completed the fastest and then incremental backups will continue going forward. We generally set the schedule to run once daily overnight, but it can run as frequently as you’d like.

Use of a local hard drive on-site permits you to keep one copy in the same location for quicker restores as the Internet service speeds are not even a factor, but a separate cloud based copy should be kept in case of unforeseen devastating events that can occur such as tornado, fire, flood, theft, electrical surge, hardware failure, and so on. Most all businesses conduct daily backups just to stay one step ahead of a potential disaster and prevent data loss.

What Data Should I Backup?

There are different types of backups you can choose from for your regularly scheduled backups, such as incremental, differential, full backup, or mirror backup. Typically, you’ll want to backup files. This will include everything from accounting files, emails or any files you’ve created or modified should be included in regular backups. The cloud offers business applications that help when you choose cloud computing, but there are multiple options.

What About a Disaster Recovery Plan?

Great question! Many small businesses don’t realize how important a disaster recovery plan is. This is for maintaining business continuity. The disaster recovery process can be time-consuming, and keeping your business running smoothly is vital. This is why having a good recovery time objective (RTO) is so important, keeping business downtime to a minimum in the event of a disaster. It is also essential to figure out your recovery point objective (RPO) when planning for disaster recovery.

Storage Options

Small business owners today have multiple options for storing backup data. More and more businesses are opting for cloud-based services like cloud computing and cloud storage. By utilizing a cloud backup service for storing data, you can save a tremendous amount of space on your own system. Plus, you want to maintain a copy of your data at a location away from your primary place of business. Cloud backup, storage, and other cloud-based services can be great solutions for multiple small business IT issues.

Who, Me? What Disaster?

Some business owners tend to think they’re excluded and that disasters won’t happen to them; they are somehow reserved for someone else. But disaster recovery can be needed for anything unexpected or uncontrollable. Things like simple human error such as accidental file deletion, natural disasters like floods, tornadoes or earthquakes, or even hardware failures – all can cause data loss that would be catastrophic without current backup data from doing regular backups.

These are all things that could easily happen to anyone, at any time – and this certainly does not provide a comprehensive list of risks – and they are all beyond our ability to control.

Blue Oak Technology Solutions

Here at Blue Oak Tech, we help small and medium-sized businesses with disaster recovery solutions, data backup strategies and so much more! We are your off-site IT department, saving you time and money with our monthly managed services so you don’t have to hire full-time staff. We strive to help smaller businesses have the same IT opportunities and tech support as larger companies with big budgets. We are small business owners too, so we understand the unique problems you can face.

Personal Tech Support 24/7

Blue Oak Technology Solutions is a local family-owned business that cares about our clients, bringing personal, customized service and keeping our prices competitive. Pay as you go for on-demand service or choose the services you need for a monthly managed package deal that’s perfect for your business. Our tech support is exemplary and we’re here for you 24/7 when necessary. We can help evaluate your current system and tell you what we can do to improve things, so check out our services below and give us a call today!

Our Services

Blue Oak Technology Solutions proudly offers the following services:

And more! Contact us right here on the homepage of this website and see how we can help your business thrive!