The saying goes, If you have client data, you’ll probably need a backup! And most small business do indeed have client data. And data backup you should have three copies. Original, a copy on a different media and the third copy in a remote location.
If you’re on Microsoft 365, a simple and easy way to do a backup is to save everything important in OneDrive. This will get you the second copy of the data in the cloud. If your main machine dies, you can quickly get back all your data by just logging into your Microsoft 365 account and syncing it down to your new machine.
OneDrive does offer some other benefits. You can select a previous version, if you accidentally deleted a file, you can fish it out within 60 days (recycle bin allows 30 days and second stage recycle bin allows for additional thirty days) but no longer after that.
Having said that, if your business requires data retention, OneDrive alone will not be sufficient and this is where an external backup mechanism is required. The backup tool creates snapshots of all the files on a schedule and retains it for the specified number of years. If there’s ransomware attack or files get corrupted, you can always go back to the backup and get the files back from a previous snapshot. There’s a plethora of tools that can be purchased and used for small business.
Prasna IT provides a selected list of backup solutions for Microsoft 365, whole machine backups and backups for servers as part of our Managed IT Service offering. Please reach out to us if you’d like to discuss your needs.
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