XFER Blog

Imagine losing your phone or having it break. Now, think about all the stuff on it: photos, texts, contacts, apps, and settings. Losing that can not only be super frustrating, it could be damaging to your reputation, your career, or even your safety. Let’s just focus on the data for the time being. If you have your mobile data backed up, the situation becomes a little bit easier to navigate. Backing up your phone is easy, and it’s one of the smartest things you can do to keep your stuff safe.

If you are a subscriber and frequent reader of this newsletter, you’re probably familiar with our campaign to educate business owners, managers, and even your average worker on the importance of backing up data. In this month’s newsletter we’ll describe incremental backup and how it works as the best scenario for small business data redundancy.

We haven’t been shy about how essential data backups are, simply because there is always the chance that your business will encounter some form of disaster… but, what if something interferes with these backups?

This danger is one reason that immutable backups are utilized. Let’s go over what this means, and how it helps.

Disaster Recovery (DR) provides your business with tools and processes to restore normal operations following a disruption. Think of it as a safety net for when things go wrong. The primary goal of your disaster recovery system is to restore critical business functions as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, we have yet another reason to reflect on the importance of data backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity for organizations everywhere. A week ago today, Hurricane Beryl made landfall in Texas, downgrading to a tropical storm, but only after it had already caused estimated damages totaling over $5 million amongst the islands of middle America.

You don’t want to take chances with something as important as your data backup. In the past, businesses would use tape backups performed manually at specific intervals to back up their data to physical drives for storage. However, tape backup has largely become obsolete compared to modern solutions like automated backup and disaster recovery (BDR).

Regarding business data backups, we’ll commonly reference something called the 3-2-1 Backup Rule. Just in case you’ve missed our explanations of these critical best practices in the past, we felt we should go over what it is and what each of its elements accomplishes.

The growth that digital storage has seen over the past several decades is immense. In that time most data has been stored on hard disk drives (HDD). Now with solid-state drives (SSD) being more affordable than ever, it’s no surprise that most computers are preferring this faster and less fragile model. Today, we wanted to highlight that fragility and try to expose some variables that help you tell if your HDD is about to fail. 

The one thing about data backup is that it seems like it is pretty simple: You have data, you copy it and store it should something happen to your original. Sure, that’s the basic makeup of a data backup, but if you want a backup you can really rely on, you need it to be faultless. Enter Backup and Disaster Recovery. 

Ransomware is a serious issue for businesses. How serious?

Think “$265 billion in costs by 2031” serious. In light of this, every organization needs to do everything possible to avoid falling victim to ransomware. Let’s touch on a few practices that will help.

Friday, March 31, 2023, is World Backup Day, the annual observance set aside to help ensure that businesses and individual users alike are doing what they need to do to protect their data from loss. Let’s go over where this observance came from, why it is so important for your business, and how you can make sure your organization is as protected as possible. 

We are of the firm belief that data backup is crucial to the continued success of any business. It can be the differentiating factor for a business that is successful and one that less unfortunate circumstances knock them off the grid for good. You can invest in your business’ future with a solid data backup solution, even if it’s there simply as a preventative measure.

How seriously does your business take data backup and disaster recovery? You might not be able to predict the future or what might occur, but you can at least prepare for it to mitigate the damage it could potentially bring about. Today, we want to share some of the best practices you can implement to combat even the worst disaster scenarios your organization might encounter.

Look, nobody likes picturing the worst-case scenario that could befall their business—even doing so might feel a bit like memorizing a divorce attorney's number as you write your wedding vows. However, failing to have some strategy in place could very well lead to your business’ downfall. What does it take to properly plan and prepare for the possibility of a disaster, and the associated recovery you’ll have to undergo?

We are consistently adamant that businesses have a comprehensive data backup strategy to help secure its operational continuity. The threat environment in which we find ourselves at the present time only reinforces the importance of such a backup strategy. This month we thought we’d take a few minutes to review what makes a business’ backup platform comprehensive. 

Data, at least nowadays, effectively makes the world go ‘round. Data is responsible for powering the operations that a business needs to undergo if it is to survive. This—as you may imagine—makes data incredibly important for businesses of all sizes to protect.

Novelty holidays have been all the rage for the past couple years. The thing is that if you are going to celebrate World Kimchi Day on November 22 or its sister holiday, World Cabbage Day on February 17, you either really like cabbage, or you really like holidays. With so many people using technology as a major part of their life and business, it’s no surprise that it is well represented on the holiday calendar. You have a few we’ve already missed: National Technology Day on January 6, Data Privacy Day on January 28, and National Clean Out Your Computer Day on February 8, but there are three important IT “holidays” this month. Let’s take a look at them now.

With a business’ data being such a priority nowadays, protecting it against all circumstances needs to be appropriately attended to. One fundamental component of this protection is the implementation of a proper backup strategy. Let’s go over the most foundational element of a successful backup, and how we recommend businesses to accomplish it: redundancy.

In business, the more time your operations stutter, the more it costs. If downtime is extended, it can cause some serious problems for your business. This is true from the one-man band to the largest enterprise. This month we thought we would outline a couple ways that downtime can have a negative effect on your business aside from the obvious.

Data backup is important. A good technician won’t even touch a computer unless they know the data is redundantly stored somewhere else. A solid backup is a critical part of any network. That said, there is backup… and then there is backup. Read on to see what I mean.