7 Things You Should Know About Data Backup
There are many steps that an organization must take to secure sensitive data and the data must be backed up on a frequent basis for security reasons. Although organizations have policies in place for securing sensitive data, there are still ways that the data can get lost if you are not aware of a few things that can cause data loss.
Things That Can Cause Data Loss
- Change of Location: If you do not perform regular backups this can cause loss of data before it gets a chance to be backed up on the server. This is because your data locations change with files getting moved to different locations in your PC. Backup recovery then has to search for the location at the last point of saving.
- Failure to Document: As a general procedure you should be documenting the location to which you are backing up the data and the procedure you use to backup critical data. Failure to perform these procedures could result in data loss. Keep in mind you should also have a consistent backup strategy that has a sound testing procedure in place.
- Lack of IT Reviews: If IT support personnel fails to schedule regular reviews that test and review whether or not the backups are effective, this could result in a significant amount of data loss. All organizations should have a testing and review policy in place.
- Failure to Do Multiple Backups: Although an organization has a secure backup procedure, backup operations are known to fail because they are a piece of technology. Many times you can save data and then re-test to make sure it is there but when you go to access it again it will not re-appear. This is why it is important to use multiple forms of backing up sensitive data.
- Corrupt Data: Data loss can occur when you back up data that contains other data files that are corrupt. For example, if you backup a series of databases and one of them contains bad data, the backup file will also be corrupt and you will be unable to access the data again.
- Storage Security: If you use multiple methods of backing up data and do not provide adequate storage security, data loss can occur through an unauthorized person accessing the sensitive data that is not stored in a secure location.
- Failure to Save Multiple Locations: If you store all of your data in multiple locations and fail to save all of the locations during the backup process, this could result in data loss. Databases and the exchange locations that you use to store data need to be backed up in their entirety.
Although your organization uses certain procedures to secure and backup data, these are some of the things that you should do to ensure the data is backed up properly on your end.
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