The Complete Guide To Data Backup Software & Solutions

Data backup and recovery is essential for your organisation. It cannot be stressed highly enough how important it is to have robust, discreet backups of your data, stored in different physical locations.

Because you can’t replace your data. Think about the things you have stored digitally. Could your business keep going if you lost it all?

Most couldn’t. According to the British Chambers of Commerce, 93% of businesses that experience a data loss of more than ten days are bankrupt within a year. Half file for bankruptcy immediately.

And data loss takes many forms. We often hear about hacks or malware exploits, but have you thought about what would happen if your offices burnt down, taking your servers with them? Or if your CEO dropped their tablet and lost all the data on there?

So you need a backup strategy. And whether you decide to do it yourself or pay a specialist company to do it for you, you need to understand what data loss and data backup is, so you can be sure you’re getting the backup service you need.

Building a Data Backup Strategy

So how do you build a viable data backup strategy? How can you make sure you’re covered when data loss happens?  

There’s a lot to think about. We’ll cover some of these points in more detail later in the article, but as a bare minimum this should be what you’re considering.

A 3-2-1 Backup Strategy

A 3-2-1 strategy is generally held to be the minimum you should have in place to make sure your data is safe. It means that you should back up to three different copies, on two different storage media, with at least one copy being held at a different physical location.

Appoint a Backup Administrator

Someone in your organisation needs to take charge of data backup. It doesn’t need to be their only role, but they do need to be responsible for creating - and maintaining - a strategy.

Work Out How Much You Have To Spend

Before you can start making decisions, you need a budget. If you don’t have a budget, the information in this guide should help you work out how much you need to spend.

What To Back up

The more you back up, the more space and bandwidth you need, the more expensive it gets. So make a list of the data your company cannot function without and work from there. Think about things like employees' home drives, operating system data, and data stored on local machines like CNC machines or tablets and phones. Then work out what you can afford to lose.

How often To Back Up

How regularly you back up is as important as what you choose to back up. Can you afford to lose a week’s worth of data? How about a day? An hour? This is known as Recovery Point Objective (RPO).

Where To Store Your Data Backup

If you’re going with a 3-2-1 strategy then you’ll need to store at least one copy of your data on a different site, ideally over 100 miles from your main site. 

Backup Technology

There are a lot of different backup storage media you can use to store your data backups, each with its own pros and cons. It’s worth looking at each one and seeing which fits your strategy best.

How Quickly You Need To Be Back Up and Running

If you have a data loss, how long can your business afford to be down? If you need a very quick turnaround, it will affect other aspects of your strategy. This is known as the Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

The Events That Could Require Backup Access

A fire that destroys your servers and all your stored data is very different from an employee who accidentally deleted a file and needs access. Different backups will suit some situations better than others.

Implementing a Robust 3-2-1 Data Backup Strategy

So how do you implement a robust 3-2-1 data backup strategy? Well, there’s no simple, one-size-fits-all solution. Different businesses, at different scales, need different approaches to backup. And it’s likely that as your business grows, you’ll outgrow your backup solution too - so it’s a good idea to build in some redundancy, and have upgrade paths in mind. 

But a 3-2-1 strategy is a good foundation for any scale of backup. 

3 - Three Different Copies of Your Data

The first copy of your data is always the ‘live’ data. These are the files - usually stored on a server - that are used every day by your employees. These might be set up in a RAID array, across several different physical drives, possibly with redundancy built in. It’s important to note that this does not count as a backup, even if your data is mirrored across several physical discs in a RAID array. RAID is great for uninterrupted service but not as a backup solution. If a user deletes a file, that file will be deleted across the array.

You could, however, install a separate server at your office, and set your RAID array to back up to it regularly. This would count as your second backup. It gives you fast, easy access to roll-back files and data.

Then there’s your third backup, which must be stored at a separate location. The idea here is that it’s physically separate so if your site is damaged or compromised – by a fire or flood, for example - your data is still safe.

2 - Two Different Media

When the 3-2-1 strategy was invented, businesses generally had their main data on a networked hard drive, and then an off-site copy on a tape drive. If your main copy is on a network drive and you have a cloud backup then that still counts as two media (even though the cloud backups are technically on lots of networked drives).

Things get tricky when your main copy is also cloud-based. Many businesses use an online cloud service (like Microsoft Onedrive) for their main data storage. For true data safety, this should also be backed up either to a local drive or to a completely separate cloud service. By just using OneDrive, you are trusting your data completely to Microsoft. If they are hacked, or have another disaster, all of your data could be unrecoverable.

1 - One Copy Stored Off Site

The simplest option here is an online backup solution. As long as you have the bandwidth, you can back up to a cloud service regularly and access it from anywhere. You could also use a tape or removable physical drive, though this will have to be regularly shipped to your second location. Whichever option you choose, this should provide data redundancy in case of disaster.

Choosing a Backup Approach

When you think of a backup, it’s easy to think of an exact, up-to-date copy of your data that you can dip into whenever you need.

But that’s not how it works.

There are several main ways to back up your data. Each method has pros and cons, so a robust strategy will utilise more than one.

Full Backup

A full data backup is exactly what it sounds like - a snapshot of all the data you have decided to back up. It’s the most robust method as it captures everything at the time of backup, but it does have some significant disadvantages.  

A full backup needs a lot of storage space. For a single snapshot of your data, you’ll need as much storage space as you have for your live data. And because you’ll need several snapshots to ensure you can always roll back to a safe dataset, you’re going to need multiples of that storage. You can soon be talking about petabytes of data, and that’s expensive.  

It’s also slow. Copying vast amounts of data over a network takes a long time, and it can also slow the network down for other traffic. The exact time will depend on the amount of data you have and the connection between the two devices but to give you an idea, copying 2 tb of data over a 1 gigabit connection takes around five hours.  

So while it’s a good idea to factor regular full backups into your strategy, it’s unlikely to work as your only approach. Even if you do full backups every week and keep a month’s worth of copies, if you have a data loss on a Friday you’re still going to lose a lot of data.

Differential Backup

A differential backup is one of two main types of partial backups. A differential backup regularly backs up any files on your system that have changed since the last full backup. So if you do a full backup on a Sunday, on Tuesday a differential backup will save all the changes made since Sunday. On Thursday, it will also save all of the changes made since Sunday.

This means that as the time since your last backup increases, so does the size of each differential backup. If your business deals with a lot of data then the storage space and network bandwidth needed by the end of a backup period can be substantial.

The advantage of a differential backup is that restore time (RTO) is lower than with incremental backups. You’ll need to reinstate your last full backup and your last differential backup to have the most recent possible data.

Incremental Backup

The other main type of partial backup is an incremental backup. This backs up any files that have changed since the last partial backup. So if your full backup is on Sunday, the next incremental backup on Monday will save the changes made since Sunday. The next incremental backup on Tuesday will save the changes since Monday, and so on.

This means that each incremental backup will be roughly the same size which can help keep storage space and bandwidth to a minimum. If your business deals with a lot of data that changes often an incremental backup can be the most efficient option.

The downside of using incremental backups is that your recovery time (RTO) is increased. If you have a data loss on a Thursday and your last full backup was Sunday, you’ll have to reinstate the full backup first then append each subsequent incremental backup for a full recovery. This can be time-consuming and complex.

Synthetic Full Backup

There are some variations on the incremental backup format that may be worth considering depending on your usage. A synthetic full backup starts with a full data backup. Then with each incremental backup it compares the differences between the original full backup and the new incremental backup, and creates a new full synthesised backup. This is done in the background.

The advantage of a full synthetic backup is that you get a regular, up-to-date full data backup that you can quickly restore from if you have a data disaster. It’s also much less demanding on both storage space and bandwidth usage, as you’re only ever creating and transferring incremental backups.

The main downside of a synthetic full backup is that you’re unlikely to have as many restore points as with some of the other options, because you have a single full backup and no access to the incremental data that is used to build the synthetic full backup.

Forever Incremental Backups

A forever incremental backup is essentially the same as a standard incremental backup except after the initial full backup all backups are incremental. As only change data is backed up the backup process is fast, and storage space requirements are kept to a minimum.

The disadvantage of forever incremental backups is that reconstructing a full snapshot after data loss can be slow. This is because your backup solution must first rebuild the original full backup, then append every subsequent incremental backup. Depending on the time since the initial full backup this can be a long process.

Choosing a Data Backup Hardware Solution

You don’t just need to pick a data backup strategy for your business. You also need to decide on what hardware you’re going to use. There are as many ways to store your backup data as there are any other data, but some will work better with some strategies than they will with others. These are some of the more popular options for different levels of backup.

Local Removable Storage

The most basic option for backing up your data is to use local removable storage. You can just plug an external hard drive or BluRay writer into your primary data storage and back up from there. This is a cheap option, and easy to remove from site for an extra layer of redundancy but it’s not really recommended for corporate backup.

If you backup manually it can get overwhelming very quickly, and most commercial backup solutions won’t work with basic removable storage. You can end up with a lot of media if you’re using writable media like BluRay discs that can be difficult to catalogue and store, and rebuilding your backup can be difficult and time-consuming.

Local NAS or Network Share

Using a local NAS or network share is a great way to build a backup solution into your existing network hardware. You can add an array of drives to an existing server or install a new server just for backup purposes.

It’s much easier to automate a backup to network storage. Most off-the-shelf backup software solutions will allow you to build an automated backup and leave it to run in the background. Network storage is a great solution for your second backup but it’s difficult to use as an off-site backup. You can also max out your storage quickly, so it’s a good idea to over-spec at the beginning and keep on top of storage requirements.

Tape Storage

A dedicated tape backup machine is a great way to store your data backup. Modern tapes can store up to 15 tb per tape, and you can spread your backup across multiple tapes. They’re easily portable so you can take them to an off-site location and they’re fast too.

But because they’re a linear storage technology tapes are only really useful for full restore backups. You can’t easily dip in and find a file that someone’s accidentally deleted.

Cloud Provider

Cloud storage for backup is a great way to bring off-site storage into your strategy. If you pick the right provider then your storage is essentially infinitely scalable so you won’t need to worry about running out of space.  

But while it may seem like a great solution, there are some major pitfalls to bear in mind with cloud storage. If you’re backing up a lot of data regularly, it can eat through your bandwidth and slow down your internet connection significantly. And if your data is sensitive, cloud storage might not meet your security requirements. Using it introduces several vulnerabilities which must be addressed.

Dedicated Hardware Solution

A dedicated hardware solution might be the best option for larger-scale data backup. It’s fast and efficient, and it can be built to your specific requirements. Restoring your data will be fast, too. Once set up it’s a robust backup solution that just works away in the background.

But dedicated backup hardware is expensive, and as your storage needs increase costs can spiral. There’s also no way to take your data offsite for extra data security.

Conclusion

Data backup is important. And it’s important to note that any backup solution is better than nothing - make sure that you have something in place as soon as possible.  

Then, you should consider what your backup needs are and what your business can sustain if you do have a disaster. Think about what data you absolutely cannot afford to lose, and make sure that’s backed up securely. Then you can work out the rest of your strategy from there.  

And that strategy should be based on the 3-2-1 principles of data backup. Budget for the best solution you can afford, but be aware that there will always be tradeoffs. Just be sure that your critical data is safe and that everyone in the business understands how the backup strategy works.