A number of organizations dedicated to online hosting have launched an interesting initiative calling today, March 31, World Backup Day. Who hasn't ever lost a USB device and regretted not having a backup? Who has not suffered the death of a hard drive and lost information that could never be recovered again? Surely most readers, and that is why I invite you to take advantage of this day to think and reflect on the importance of backup.Therefore, if you want to take advantage of the day of the date to start making backups on your systems, I share with you the three questions that must be asked before you start making them:
What information should I back up? A backup is not simply the indiscriminate storage of all the files in the system, but it is important in some way (at least simple) to value the information and decide what information you need to have a backup. For example, in an image folder, family and children's photos are not the same as a folder of interesting wallpapers. Surely the first of these must be subjected to a backup process while the second may be information that the user is willing to lose in case of an incident, due to the ease of recovering or re-assembling it. Second, it is important to define how information will be stored and backed up. There are many methods and technologies available for this, and among the most frequent we can mention, on the hardware side, using USB devices (both a pen drive and an external hard drive), optical devices (CD or DVD) as well as hard drives in the cloud. Any of these possibilities is feasible, and depending on the size of the backup, costs and other factors; the user may opt for any of these. On the other hand, from the software side, we could say that in the home environment the most important decision is whether to use an application for this purpose, or not. In many cases, tasks can be performed manually on a regular basis. Third, backups must be made periodically, but you have to define how often they will be made. Every day? every week? In general, that will depend on how often the information is modified. If one stores in a file the daily progress of a project, surely every day it will be necessary to make a backup copy. An image folder may only need to be backed up when new photos are saved, and so on as the case may be. In the corporate sphere, it is worth adding one more question, and no less important: who will perform the backup? I have had to meet and visit companies where expensive backup systems have been implemented (both hardware and software), and yet these are not taken advantage of or are not used since it is not clear who is responsible for this task. On the other hand, it is worth noting that in these business environments, it is necessary to implement a backup system that, as already said, should preferably be supported by hardware or software designed for this purpose, such as tools that allow incremental backup copies to not store information that was already backed up previously, and that has not changed since the last backup.Backup copies are part of the corrective measures around security controls, so it is worth noting that their importance is given by the need to be accompanied by preventive measures against incidents that threaten information. For example, in the event of a ransomware infection, a malicious code that blocks access to the user's files and asks for money in return to return them, a backup could be very useful for the user to recover their information. However, the presence of antivirus software or other preventive measure could directly prevent infection and thus also the risks associated with not having all the necessary information in the backup copy.
Today is Backup Day, which seemed to us a good reason to remember the importance of making backup copies and, from the reader's side, we invite you to ask yourself these three questions, and remember that making a backup can be easier than you imagine and, fundamentally, it is a great security measure that will surely save you some headache.
Source: ESET Latianoamérica
