All businesses hope that they’ll never have to use their data backup and disaster recovery plan, but the point stands that each business should have one, just in case of a worst-case scenario. For a small business with a limited budget, the prospect of investing in a solution they might never need is daunting. To help you get started, we’ve put together a couple of basic backup practices that you should keep in mind for your business.

Back Up As Much Data as Possible
If you’re wondering what data your organization should prioritize, the correct answer is all of it. Data is invaluable in the business world, and even if you think you can make do without some of it, chances are that you can’t guarantee it won’t be useful somewhere down the road. You should never accept data loss of any kind. Tape backup systems tend to take complete backups, but they often can only be performed once a day, making it difficult to take and deploy them adequately without running the risk of either operational inefficiency or losing at least some data from the past 24 hours. We recommend a cloud-hosted backup system that takes snapshots of data that has been changed recently, guaranteeing that all files are kept as up-to-date as possible.

Take Backups as Frequently as Possible
In the event your organization suffers from a disaster, you want to make sure that your backups are as recent as possible. This is to make sure that you lose as little progress as possible when disasters do happen. Imagine finding out that the only data backup you’ve taken was last month. This is why we recommend that your organization take backups as often as every fifteen minutes, guaranteeing that you’ll lose minimal data.

Restore as Quickly as Possible
Let’s imagine that your organization is struck by a disaster. To get back in the game following such an incident, you have to restore your data. However, if you don’t have an infrastructure or device put in place to get this happening as soon as possible, you start to suffer from downtime. This is any time that your organization isn’t functioning as intended, so it should include situations where your technology is failing, your employees can’t work, and your organization can’t take care of customers, among anything else that your business is responsible for. It quickly becomes clear that one of the biggest causes for businesses failing following a disaster is the crippling costs of downtime.

Notice a trend here? Time is of the essence when disaster strikes your organization, and the faster you can get back in action following a disaster, the less money you’ll waste on downtime. The traditional data backup solution isn’t as helpful in this regard as a hosted BDR solution from Dresner Group. Our BDR device can rapidly restore data directly to itself so that your organization can keep chugging along in the face of adversity.