How to check that your backups are really working

A recent article from the BBC noted that a survey conducted by a famous name in the Anti-Virus business has shown that 2015 was a bad year for the security of personal and business data. The reason for last year being such a good year for scammers was that more than 500 million digital identities (names, passwords and other ID information) were stolen while fake technical support scams and ransomware attacks grew by 200% and 35% respectively during the 12 months leading into 2016.

Reading into this data it appears that these trends will continue to grow as scammers become more professional in their work to corrupt and steal information from home and business users, and, as a result of this, ensuring the safety of your data, via the means of a backup server, a Windows image backup or cloud based backups, has never been more important than right this second.

Ensure your data is safe:

There are many ways of ensuring that your data is safe and secure so that should the worst happen and you be caught up in a scam or experience corruption of your information due to a ransomware attack, such as via a Cryptolocker infection, so that you can always come back from this with your personal and business data all available from when the attack began.

The first line of defence against this, and – to be honest – all, type of data safety issue is education. If users are educated correctly and then take on board these lessons they will be aware of the inherent risks associated with both working online and exclusively storing data on their devices. Educating users allows to become aware of phishing scams, embedded viruses in attachments and the risks at clicking on random pop-up advertisements whilst browsing the internet and then avoid exposing themselves to this risk.

Unfortunately, as the name suggests, human error is still rife and more than 25% of all data loss incidents can be directly attributed to mistakes and actions made by users. As a result of this, coupled with the fact that there is no guaranteed method of preventing errors being made by users, the only sure-fire way to be 100% certain that your valuable personal information and vital business data is secure is by backing up the data remotely so should the worst case scenario happen and it is deleted, encrypted or in any other way made unusable a copy of the data can be located and used to restore everything that you need.

However, even backing up your data itself is fraught with danger as data tapes can become damaged or connection issues during the backup can lead to vital information not being saved causing major damage to one’s personal data artefacts or a hammer blow to a business from which it may never recover. Making the correct choice of who to create your server backup or Windows image backup with is vital for ensuring that your information is safe no matter what.

As a result of this, users should always be aware of the following tips to ensure that there are no issues with their backed up data should the worst happen and they need to restore their data.

Backup checks:

• At set deadlines, for example every 30 days, two or three months or even twice yearly, do a test of the currently saved data by restoring a small number of files/folders to a machine to ensure that this data can then be used. The last thing that is needed in the event of an emergency is to restore the data and find that is unusable or corrupted.

• When the backup has been run ensure that the backup file is checked to see that all the files, folders and the rest of the information that has been requested to be saved is all available in newly created backup. Again, should data loss occur you do not want to find out that a portion of vital information is not available as it has not been stored where it should have been.

• If you’re using tape backups then, whenever upgrading systems within the company, ensure that the new hardware is compatible with the tapes on which your backups are stored as you will be unable to restore if they do not match. This happens more than you’d think and will leave you in serious trouble if your data needs to be restored quickly.

• Create a full step-by-step checklist of how to restore data from the backups and disseminate this to all of the people who may be called upon to process the backup if the business data is lost. Not only send this electronically but print off copies and hand each nominated person a copy and have other copies pinned around the areas where these people will be able to see and access them.

Following these simple steps will ensure that your data is viable and can be used if and when it is most desperately needed without any interruption or disruption to business.

The Iperius backup software offers users and businesses the perfect combination of ease of use and security for users, as well as the highest levels of recommendation and professionalism, to ensure that should they suffer data loss, whether due to human error, malicious intent or by any other possible situation that can be thought of their personal and business information is available online, physically or both.

The Iperius software allows users to utilise both the physical and online backup options via the usage of external USB drives, NAS and TAPE devices, other computers in the network, FTP servers for the former and a cloud backup, where users can send their files and data to a number of well-known online storage services that include Google Drive, Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Dropbox and OneDrive for the latter of the two methods.

As well as this the Iperius software offers an innovative and unique Web Console that allows users to run remote backups of all their data, update all of their installed Iperius software clients and also check the status of all the backed up data plus devices and workstations that the software is installed on.

How to use all the features of the Web Console

Iperius offer tutorials on each of these processes, and you can read these full walkthroughs here.

Backup to tape – Backup to Google Drive – Backup to Azure (Microsoft Cloud) -
Backup to DropBox – Backup to OneDrive – Backup to Amazon S3

(Italian, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil))