10 min.
How to Back Up Your Server and Computer System I.T. Overdrive
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- Technologie
When it comes to backups, there are many methods out there, all at different price levels. We typically cloud our clients typically employ one of three methods. The first one, is kind of the old tried and true method. You can buy a couple of external little portable, external hard drives, and plug them into your server.
We run a little backup system software that backs up to these external hard drives, and you can swap them out typically once a week and put them in a fireproof safe or take them home to get them off site. So the worst case in that backup solution is if something happens to your server, you lose no more than a week of your data. Not ideal, but from a cost standpoint, it's cheap and works fine, but you're also reliant upon somebody to swap those drives out, take those drives home, or put them in the safe and make them secure.
And if that doesn't happen, then the backups don't occur. Or if there is a disaster and both drives are at the site, and you have a flood or a tornado or something happens in the server room, it doesn't do you any good if all of your backups are all sitting in one place. We may have a couple of clients that still do that, but we kind of cringe at that. We don't recommend it, but cheap guys are going to be cheap.
The next solution is just a cloud backup system. There's plenty of them out there that'll back up your computer to the cloud, and you just pay a monthly fee depending on how much storage. And they make those for businesses as well. And we do have quite a few clients that use that works great. It's automated, you set it and forget it. The files are backed up. You get a report typically every day saying yes, the backup was successful, or it wasn't successful.
It's still inexpensive. It doesn't cost that much per month, and you know that it's done, that it's taken care of, and you don't have to worry about it. To restore data takes a little time because you have to download it. And depending on your internet connection, it might take a full day maybe two, to download all of that. So you're talking about being out of commission for three, four days in a disaster.
Finally, the last one and the best system out is a true backup and disaster recovery system is called Datto. There are a few others out there. Datto is a pretty big player in the market and typically these are clients that can't afford to be down at all, business critical. It's a small server we place on their network. That server then makes an exact duplicate of their on-premise servers. It makes a duplicate of the operating system. The settings, the entire server, it creates what's called an image.
The great thing is it does this every hour. So if we have a client that creates a file at 10:00 AM and one of their other users deletes it at noon, we can go back and pull the file from the 11 o'clock backup. The nice thing is if their server were to crater, that backup appliance will actually fire up that server on itself, bring it up in a virtual environment. And 15 minutes later, they're back up and running until they can replace the hardware.
Do you need help staying secure or creating backups? Give us a call!
Get all links, resources and show notes at https://itoverdrivepodcast.com/11
When it comes to backups, there are many methods out there, all at different price levels. We typically cloud our clients typically employ one of three methods. The first one, is kind of the old tried and true method. You can buy a couple of external little portable, external hard drives, and plug them into your server.
We run a little backup system software that backs up to these external hard drives, and you can swap them out typically once a week and put them in a fireproof safe or take them home to get them off site. So the worst case in that backup solution is if something happens to your server, you lose no more than a week of your data. Not ideal, but from a cost standpoint, it's cheap and works fine, but you're also reliant upon somebody to swap those drives out, take those drives home, or put them in the safe and make them secure.
And if that doesn't happen, then the backups don't occur. Or if there is a disaster and both drives are at the site, and you have a flood or a tornado or something happens in the server room, it doesn't do you any good if all of your backups are all sitting in one place. We may have a couple of clients that still do that, but we kind of cringe at that. We don't recommend it, but cheap guys are going to be cheap.
The next solution is just a cloud backup system. There's plenty of them out there that'll back up your computer to the cloud, and you just pay a monthly fee depending on how much storage. And they make those for businesses as well. And we do have quite a few clients that use that works great. It's automated, you set it and forget it. The files are backed up. You get a report typically every day saying yes, the backup was successful, or it wasn't successful.
It's still inexpensive. It doesn't cost that much per month, and you know that it's done, that it's taken care of, and you don't have to worry about it. To restore data takes a little time because you have to download it. And depending on your internet connection, it might take a full day maybe two, to download all of that. So you're talking about being out of commission for three, four days in a disaster.
Finally, the last one and the best system out is a true backup and disaster recovery system is called Datto. There are a few others out there. Datto is a pretty big player in the market and typically these are clients that can't afford to be down at all, business critical. It's a small server we place on their network. That server then makes an exact duplicate of their on-premise servers. It makes a duplicate of the operating system. The settings, the entire server, it creates what's called an image.
The great thing is it does this every hour. So if we have a client that creates a file at 10:00 AM and one of their other users deletes it at noon, we can go back and pull the file from the 11 o'clock backup. The nice thing is if their server were to crater, that backup appliance will actually fire up that server on itself, bring it up in a virtual environment. And 15 minutes later, they're back up and running until they can replace the hardware.
Do you need help staying secure or creating backups? Give us a call!
Get all links, resources and show notes at https://itoverdrivepodcast.com/11
10 min.