Backup

A backup is a second copy of your files, kept somewhere that cannot be harmed by whatever harms the first one. That last part is the whole idea, and it is exactly the part most businesses skip.

The old rule still holds, so keep three copies of anything you cannot afford to lose. Those copies should sit on two different kinds of storage, and one of them has to live away from the building and away from the network. People remember the first two parts and forget the third, which is the only one that saves them.

A sync folder is not a backup. Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and the shared network drive all do the same job, which is to show the same files on every computer. That is convenient until the day it is dangerous, because if you delete an invoice by mistake it disappears everywhere within seconds. A folder that copies your mistakes as fast as it copies your work is a duplicate, not a backup.

Ransomware is the reason one copy must stay out of reach, because it locks every file it can open and then asks for money. It does not stop at the computer it landed on, since it walks the network and locks the shared drive, the server and any external disk still plugged in. The businesses Linkysoft helps after an attack almost always had a backup, plugged in and locked with everything else. The copy the network cannot touch is the one that comes back.

So ask three questions of whoever holds your data. The first is how far back you can go, only to yesterday or to the version from three weeks ago, before the numbers went wrong. The second is how long a restore really takes, and the third is when they last put a real file back from that copy. On Hostrena hosting a site is copied every day and kept for weeks, so a page you broke on Tuesday comes back as it was on Monday. Linkysoft still asks clients to keep a copy of their own, on a disk that lives outside the office. During a security review we test the restore rather than the backup log, because a green log has never brought a file back.