Backups
One of the most important aspects of digital security is ‘backup’. This is a process of creating a copy of one’s data, so that when data is lost or corrupted one can easily restore their devices to their original state before the disaster.
There are several steps as shown below, that will be discussed in order for you to come up with the appropriate backup strategy that best fits you as an individual or your organisation.
Identifying and organising your information
The first step to formulating a backup policy is to picture where your personal and work information is currently located. Having this picture will help you assess or separate important documents from non-important and also help you prioritise what to back up or not. Coming up with a table that clearly shows you where all your information is stored is critical, so that you won’t forget to back up data that you deem as important.
If you can’t afford to lose it, back it up!
Defining your Backup Strategy
After the successful creation of the data location table, you will need to define the strategy of the backup. The aim of producing a backup strategy is to make sure that a computer system can be returned to its original state if data has been lost or corrupted. There are several considerations that you need to ask yourself in order to come up with a sound strategy:
- Selection of storage medium depends on volume of data.
- Frequency of backup depends on how often the data is updated and valued.
- Number of backup copies kept depends on how often data is updated and valued.
- What will be copied; full (all data) or differential (just changes).
- Recovery procedures; how quickly correct data is needed
- Location of backup – how secure is this data?
Creating a Digital backup
Once you have managed to take into account the above-discussed considerations, you now need to decide the particular backup type you would want to implement. There are several technical ways to create your own digital backup, but we are going to discuss two of the most common ones:
- Full Backup – A full copy of the system or selected files are copied to existing media. A different copy will be created if the backup is done again on another day. Restoring from a disaster is easy as the system can be restored from just one backup image. However, if the volume of data is large then the backup may take many hours to do both the backup and restoration processes.
- Incremental Backup – One full copy of the system or selected files is copied to media. Only changes since the last backup (whether full or incremental), are copied as backup. If you do an incremental backup on Tuesday, you only backup the data that changed since the incremental backup on Monday. The result is a much smaller, faster backup. The characteristic of incremental backups is the shorter the time interval between backups, the less data to be backed up. While incremental backups give much greater flexibility and granularity (time between backups), they have the reputation for taking longer to restore because the backup has to be reconstituted from the last full backup and all the incremental backups since.
Backup Media Options
There are two common ways that are used to store your backup which are:
- Offline – this is the use of physical devices such as flash disks, external hard drives, Local Area Network shared device locations or compact disks.
Tip: Your backup should be stored in a lockable cabinet and not be moved around with the master source e.g. having your external hard drive with your backup in the same bag as the laptop. A backup is only that when it is miles away from the original.
- Online – this is the use of remote servers/services which are accessed over the Internet. Such services include but are not limited to Google Drive, DropBox, One Drive and Tip: Make sure that you secure access to these backup locations with a strong password as discussed easier.
Note: Online backup services depending with your backup size can be costly in terms of Internet packages or bandwidth usage. Make sure that you have a reliable, cost effective and efficient Internet connection. Also, it is wise to be aware that service providers may change their services at any point, meaning they can decide to get rid of the cloud back up service. With that, there goes your data.
Verifying your digital backup
Before we conclude that you have done a successful backup, there is need to verify that the backup has actually occurred successfully. This can be achieved through restoration or just opening to see if the files are there and not corrupted. If you have managed to open your backup and see that all your files are there and you can open them, only then can one conclude that the backup you is indeed good and verified.
Tip: Always make sure that your offline backup is password protected