Today is World Backup Day, and with the prevalence and sophistication of cybercrime growing every day, it’s more important than ever – as a business and as an everyday user – to understand that cyber hygiene is critical.
Michael Covington, vice president of Portfolio Strategy from Apple device management and security company, Jamf, has provided some tips and tricks, as well as info about the importance of backing up data. To wit:
- Backup is a two-way street. Backing up your laptop or phone is obvious. But does anyone backup their cloud service? What if Dropbox was compromised or went out of business? Or what if your personal account was hacked and someone deleted or changed all your data? Need to have a comprehensive plan that doesn’t just look at personal device failure, but any of the risks in the infrastructure that houses your data.
- Automate. Automate. Automate. Don’t rely on yourself or a team to remember to actively press the button. Use services like iCloud or automated backup tools like ArcBackup.
- Encrypt your backups. Make sure you also backup the key. Losing the encryption key or password could be a problem.
- Have a plan that accounts for device theft/loss. Don’t put your passwords or critical files necessary to unlock backups in harms way.
- Organize/compartmentalize your data for easy retrieval. If a data drive is lost with all of your photos, don’t incur the expense of pulling everything you’ve ever logged out of cold storage so you can retrieve a single directory. Make it easy to find data.
- Consider your lifestyle and the related risks that you encounter. If you travel often, don’t rely on on-premises backup tools like a NAS or data-center based file servers; embrace cloud. If you do utilize on-premises solutions, have a backup-of-the-backup that resides off-site in case of fire, vandalism or theft.
- Consider your budget. There are very inexpensive solutions that may take exceptionally long times to backup or retrieve data. And there are very expensive solutions that may be overkill for what you’re using. The reality is that you’ll likely take advantage of the service at some point in your lifetime; make smart decisions that are aligned with the value of your data and the need for multiple snapshots over time.
- Prune old files that are no longer needed from long-term backup.
- Backup only critical files in multiple places.
- Use a mix of on-premises and cloud to balance costs and retrieval speeds.
