Skip to content

The Best Home Data Backup and Recovery Strategy

home data backup and recovery strategy

We don’t appreciate what we have until it’s gone.Boris Yeltsin This is true about love and also true about data. Think of it. The world would seem to stop turning if all of our photos, spreadsheets, applications and other documents were gone in a blink of an eye.

If you do an online search on how long a computer can be expected to last the answers vary widely. It can be said with some confidence that a computer between 5 to 10 years old is on shaky ground indeed.

Are you willing to take such chances with your hard earned data? We think not because you are here! So let’s get into “The Best Home Data Backup and Recovery Strategy.”

Why Should You Have A Data Backup and Recovery Strategy?

In short, to recover your precious data from a complete and catastrophic data loss. Data loss and the events that preceded it can be both expensive and painful. Even a minor data loss affecting 100 or fewer files could result in downtime and financial loss.

What Are The Causes Of Data Loss?

Data loss can happen from a plethora number of reasons but here are just a few.

#1 Cyber attacks

  • Denial-of-Service (DOS) – cripples system with a multitude of bogus requests
  • Eavesdropping – The intercepting of network data in order to obtain bank information, credit card numbers, passwords and trade secrets
  • Malware – (ransomware, trojans, spyware, viruses, worms and logic bombs)
  • Ransomware – Ransomware is a type of malware that exploits encryption to take a victim’s data hostage. Critical data of a user or organization is encrypted so that they cannot access files, databases, or applications. After that, a ransom is requested in order to provision access.
  • Phishing – By appearing legitimate a victim is fooled into providing confidential information
  • Man-in-the-Middle – When a hacker is between a trusted client and a server
  • SQL Injections – The execution of database queries from a website’s search box to obtain confidential information from the server.
  • Weak Password Hack – How? By attempting to use the most commonly used passwords, random guessing, network data intercepts, or even looking over one’s shoulder.

To name just a few of the many ways that systems can be overrun by those with malicious intent.

(A side note on ransomeware) Paying a ransom to hackers, after a ransomware attack, may not necessarily restore your data. It is also discouraged because such funding of cyber pirates only encourage further assaults.

did you backup your data

#2 Physical Equipment Damage and Natural Disasters

  • Fire
  • Flood (Which could be merely a glass of water mistakenly spilled on a laptop.)
  • Earthquake
  • Electrical power surge
  • Rambunctious children and pets
  • Accidental drop
  • Car accident

#3 Hardware Theft or Permanent Misplacement

  • Home break-in
  • Leaving your laptop on a bus or train

Instead of being a victim, you you can secure your data by means of a solid backup and recovery plan. Only then can you retrieve uninfected versions of your data and restore it to the state of the last backup. But what is a good strategy to protect yourself from data loss?

3 2 1 Backup Strategy

The 3-2-1 backup rule is a simple acronym describing a standard strategy to ensure the safety of your data in practically every failure scenario. A 3-2-1 backup rule is used when you have three copies of your important files.

Create two copies of your data that are kept locally. One is your live production data on the local drive and a second data copy stored on a different media. This other media can be NAS, SAN or an external hard drive. The third copy should be stored at an external location.

You should also make sure that all three backups are up to date and tested regularly so they don’t expire before you need them.

Backup to a NAS

A NAS or a Network Attached Storage is an external storage device used to store heavy information or data. It is a smart hard disk that smoothly operates and transfers data from the primary device to itself without any data loss.

Since the device operates irrespective of your computer, anything that happens to your computer won’t affect NAS. You can connect it with another computer and get back to work once again.

The biggest perk of owning a NAS over any other external drive storage is its high storage limit.

Furthermore, you can create your own VM backup appliance by installing the NAKIVO solution on a NAS.

The advantage of the other local backup copy provides faster and easier recovery in the event of a disaster.

Backup to an External Hard Drive

Can an external hard disk drive be employed as a backup? It’s an easy and cost-effective way to store all kinds of data, yes. It can be the data source to restore your system after a data loss event.

Backup to a Remote External Location

“Remote” means as far off as feasible. This could be in a different city, region, country, continent or planet….well maybe someday!

This way the remote storage shouldn’t be destroyed by any changes or loss of the local copies of your data.

Keeping one backup copy offsite improves data protection.

cloud storage

cloud storage

What Is Cloud Backup?

Cloud computing is a broad term that describes hosted services delivered over the internet.

In contrast to traditional web hosting, cloud services are sold on-demand, elastic, and managed by the service provider. In addition, a cloud can be either private or public.

A public cloud, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), offers services to anybody on the internet, whereas a private cloud provides hosted services to a small number of users.

By using a cloud backup you place a copy of your the data and applications from your live production data and save it to a remote server over an internet connection.

How Does a Cloud Backup Work?

Cloud backup comes in a variety of forms, including:

Direct backup to the public cloud 

Duplicating the original files in a public cloud is one cloud backup strategy. For instance, AWS and Microsoft Azure provide public cloud services to their users to write and edit their data.

Simply utilize the backup software to build the data copy to transfer to the cloud storage provider. The cloud storage service thus serves as the data’s storage location and safekeeping.

In this case, it’s critical that the backup program can communicate with the cloud’s storage provider. Furthermore, with public cloud solutions, IT professionals may need to investigate additional data security processes. Ask your provider if you should have further concerns or questions.

• Using a service provider as a backup

The service-provider data recovery method is a backup plan that the organization uses to transmit its files to the service included in the package or supports specific commercially available backup applications.

• Selecting a cloud-to-cloud (C2C) backup solution

These services are some of the most recent additions to the cloud backup market. The software that manages this procedure is usually hosted by the cloud-to-cloud backup provider.

As the name suggests, the data transfers from one cloud to another for better data management using SaaS (software as a service).

Test Your Backups

Don’t just trust that your backups will work. Be sure to test them to make sure. Your backup is there to correct a potential data loss event but if the data is corrupted or the retrieval process is busted in some way, your backup won’t be much good. Schedule regular tests to restore a few random files and ensure that the process is smooth.

3 2 1 Backup Rule Infographic

Share this Image On Your Site

Please include attribution to comparisonarena.com with this graphic.

Conclusion

Data loss can happen at any time without warning so it is important to have multiple backups of all important files.

Frequently Asked Questions

To backup Gmail, follow out the following steps thoroughly:

  1. Click on myaccount.google.com for your Gmail data recovery.
  2. Under the Privacy and Personalization drop-down menu, go to “Manage your data & personalization.”
  3. At the bottom corner of the screen, you will find “Download or delete your data.” To backup your Gmail data, click on download data.
  4. Now to set the recovery platform where this data will get stored, go to “Delivery method,”
  5. From there, click on the location of your preference out of the following options: OneDrive, Google Drive, Box, or Dropbox.

That’s all. After completing the above, the system will set up your data backup. However, it may take some time, depending upon the total file size.

What is the best way to backup my MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, or iMac?

To do so, the best and the easiest way is to use Time Machine. For that, you need to:

  1. Connect an external storage device to your Mac like a USB or NAS that will store the original file copies.
  2. Connect to stable Wi-Fi.
  3. Complete the Time Machine Setup.
  4. Transfer the files from your device to the external storage device.

And that’s it. Your files in Mac are backed up.

Some of the best backup software you can use are:

  • Acronis True Image
  • EaseUs ToDo Backup
  • Paragon Backup and Recovery

There are many free recovery software available online.

Some of the best free recovery software include:

1. Fastboot – It helps in removing any OS related errors like Bootloop, Bootloader and other system failures on Android devices.

2. R-Studio – It is a versatile open source data recovery tool that works on Windows, Linux and MacOS systems to recover files from hard drives or partitions even if they have been deleted or lost due to corruption, hardware failure or human error.

3. Recuva – This is an effective file search and undelete utility for Windows computers that can help you find any type of file that you may have accidentally deleted from your computer such as photos, documents, music and videos.

The three backup types are:

  1. differential backup
  2. full backup
  3. incremental backup