What would happen to your business if you suddenly lost access to all of your files? How would you deal with the personal loss of one-of-a-kind family photos?

We all know that we should backup, but do we actually do it? Backup is always easy to sell the day after the data is lost! Hard drives fail (for other people) and data recovery is expensive, if it works. Solid State Drives (SSDs) are more resistant to g-forces—bumps and drops, and much faster, but when they fail it is often a total loss.

If we have done anything, we have purchased an external drive to back things up. This is a good beginning, but there are problems.

1. External hard drives can die, too! Heat and g-forces (how many people have knocked over an external drive and had that horrible sinking feeling when your computer no longer sees the drive or your precious files? Not to mention the fire or electrical event that killed you computer also killed your external hard drive.
2. External drives are stored safely in a cabinet and the backup gets forgotten. Since it isn’t hooked up the software skips the scheduled backup. What good is a backup from 6 months ago?
3. Or, external drives are left hooked up all the time. A drive that is hooked up all the time—whether via USB cord or the network, is subject to being encrypted by ransomware. This means that you lose your files and your backups at the same time. So when you need your backup the most, it fails you.

So what can we do? The best solution is a hybrid solution—with local backup and a cloud-based versioning backup. If your cloud-based backup does proper versioning, even after your backup software sent the newest version of the file (which was just encrypted by the ransomware!), you can still restore the unencrypted file that you backed up the day before.

Our choice is simple. Do we pay for backup now, or do we pay for data recovery later? Even worse, do we pay the ransom to get our files back? Maybe we will get our files back but we have just made sure that ransomware continues to grow as a problem for everyone. As long as it is easy to make money by holding business and personal files hostage, ransomware will continue to grow as a threat.

Here at Ed’s Computer Solutions we can help you put together the data backup package that is best suited for your needs.  Most small businesses will find that a hybrid package is best for them. The combination of a properly-sized local USB or Network Attached Storage (NAS) drive and a cloud-based service is ideal. In the event of a hard drive failure, a local image can be restored quickly, getting you back up and running. A cloud-based restore will be limited by your internet speed, so a complete system restore will take longer. Some cloud services will send you an external drive with your files for recovery in the event of a system failure. On the other hand, if you need to recover deleted or infected files, your cloud-based backup will save your business.

You can call us for a custom backup solution, or you can just get started with a true versioning cloud-based backup plan from IDrive. Click on the link and get started today! Please note that the new BMR product includes Bare Metal Recovery for your computer drive, not just data!

IDrive partner=edscomputersol

make sure to use promo code edscomputersol