With the holiday season upon us, it’s time to break out the lights, decorations, gifts and, of course, good food. Thanksgiving is a time for all of us to give thanks and spend time with the ones we love. Like many families, my family partakes in a variety of holiday traditions. Every Turkey Day we bring out the “Giving Tree.” The Giving Tree contains blank leaves, which are filled out anonymously with phrases and sayings of what each of us is thankful for. After dinner, each leaf is pulled off the tree and read aloud. Family members then have to guess which leaf belongs to whom. I’ll give you a hint: any leaf that mentions the Green Bay Packers is probably mine.
The Giving Tree is a one-time occurrence that takes place on the night of Thanksgiving. Backing up your data, on the other hand, is something that needs to be routine. The most important information that resides on any endpoint is your data. Operating systems and applications can be reinstalled relatively easily; however, getting your original data back is not so easy. Backing up your data is paramount when it comes to data protection. According to the Global Data Protection Index, a third-party study that surveyed 2,200 IT decision makers across 18 countries, 30% of respondents had lost data in the last 12 months!
There are a variety of methods you can use to back up data. In the past, backing up data to an external hard drive or tape was standard operating procedure. In today’s IT landscape, businesses large and small are adopting more modern and automated approaches such as cloud backup. Backing up data has moved from a cumbersome manual process to a simple automated process in a relatively short amount of time. For example, Mozy by Dell lets you log in to an easy-to-use admin console and set backups to happen automatically on a weekly, daily or hourly cadence, depending on user needs.
Backing up your data is one thing, testing and validating your backups is another. Just because you performed a backup of your data doesn’t mean you will be able to restore it. Testing your backups will ensure that if disaster does strike, your data will be restored accurately and in a timely manner.
Backing up your data is one of the most beneficial and affordable practices you can adopt as an IT professional. The level of data protection you demand is up to you. If you do not have a backup plan in place, consider it as your 2017 New Year’s resolution. Have a happy and safe holiday season.
