So, imagine this situation—you walk into your house, turn the light switch on, and you hear that tingly “pop” sounds as the light burns out. If you were smart and prepared, you should probably have some extra light bulbs on hand in your closet. If you don’t have any spares, well then, you’ll have to fumble in the dark until you can get some.

Now imagine that this time, instead of your lightbulb, it’s your company’s data server that goes kaput. If you have planned properly and had a backup copy of all your company data, then you could just boot that up and be right back where you started. However, if you do not have any backup data, then you will be struggling for a while trying to figure out how to recover important documents and customer information.

Nobody wants to think about their house burning down or their car being crushed by a boulder, but they prepare for those emergency situations all the same. Having a data backup for your business servers can help prevent a further disaster caused by losing crucial company information.

As such, the choice of data backup services is absolutely essential for businesses. Business owners need to be certain that their data is safe and secure in case anything goes awry. To that end, it’s important to know some things about data backup.

What Should I Back Up?

Obvious candidates for backing up include important documents and customer information such as accounts, files, and databases. However, you should also make sure to back up other programs relevant to your business, such as operating systems, applications, configurations; everything that is relevant to your business’s information system. Those who use virtual machines should back up their host and management console, and even company mobile devices should be backed up. After all, it’s possible that the CEO has important company information stored on his or her tablet.

You also need to regularly update your backup data. This includes updating every time you change your IT infrastructure. New devices and new solutions should immediately be covered under the scope of your backup data and you should take advantage of as many modalities to backup and store data as possible.

RPO and RTO

Two other important factors to consider are Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO). RPO is essentially the maximum amount of time you are willing to lose due to a data failure. The shorter your RPO, the less potential data you would lose in a crash, but the more often you will have to update your backup systems.

RTO refers to the total amount of time it takes you to recover from a data loss and get back to normal operation. AS you might expect, even being down for a few days can be a significant loss for a business. Shorter RTO times correspond to faster storage and networking technologies that can rebuild your database quicker.

For more information, visit Economic Computers today!