Following on from last month’s look at IT security, this month’s focus in on data backups, writes Michael Branford.

According to the London Chamber of Commerce, around 90% of businesses that lose data in a disaster are forced to close within two years – so it is important to check your procedures before you have a problem.

Many business owners believe they have good backups, but we often find this isn’t the case.

I would advise all businesses to check their backups – and more importantly their ability to restore lost data.

Here are a few things to consider when looking at this for your business.

Know where is your data should be stored. Many businesses have file servers, and back these up regularly – but often there is data stored elsewhere, such as on local PCs and laptops that are not backed up. Having IT policies that require staff to save data in the correct place and training them so they know how to do so makes backups easier to manage.

Save your files regularly. The most common way data is lost is through computers crashing while working on files. It may not be business critical to lose a file this way – but it is very frustrating to lose a document you have worked on for several hours – especially if you have a deadline to meet. Save your work regularly, and wherever possible enable the autosave option in the programs you use.

Try and employ a rule of 3-2-1. A good starting point for your backup policy is to have at least three backups on two different types of media and have at least one backup offsite. What this may mean is practice is using a combination of external hard drives, tapes, network attached storage or cloud based backups as part of your backup policy.

Look at backup requirements for each area of your business. For example, your order processing system may need backing up more regularly than your HR or marketing data. Some software systems, such as Sage have their own backup functions that they recommend – do you use these? The loss of a week’s marketing data may not be business critical, but the loss of a day’s orders may be. The key issue is to consider the impact of loss of data for each business area and ensure your backups are appropriate for each.

Plan to restore as well as backup. Often businesses have a backup policy, but don’t consider how they will restore data, or how long it may take. For example, it may be quick to restore a small number of files from a cloud backup – but if you had to recover ALL of your data how long would this take? If you lost a server through hardware failure or theft how quickly could you get a replacement and restore your data?

An appropriate backup solution will vary from business to business, if you don’t have a plan in place for your company contact your IT provider to discuss your options.