Backups For Small Business
Backups are copies of data that are stored separately from the original files to protect against loss, corruption, or theft.
They can be stored on hard drives, cloud storage, or other backup systems, and are critical for ensuring business continuity in case of disasters such as cyberattacks, hardware failures, or accidental deletions.
For many small businesses, backups are vital because they help prevent data loss that could otherwise lead to financial losses, reputational damage, or even business closure. Threats like ransomware, natural disasters, and perhaps most commonly – human error – can all result in the loss of critical data. A reliable backup strategy ensures that businesses are able to recover quickly and resume operations without significant downtime.
Some small businesses rely on backups more than others, particularly those that handle sensitive or irreplaceable data. For example, medical practices, law firms, and financial services deal with highly confidential information, making data loss particularly damaging. Similarly, e-commerce businesses, SaaS providers, and IT service companies depend on digital data to function, so losing customer information, transaction records, or operational data could be catastrophic. Any business that relies heavily on digital assets should prioritize strong backup policies.
There are many backup options available to small businesses, and it can be daunting to begin navigating the backup landscape.
The type and quality of backup – whether local or remote, cloud-based, file only or full-image, ease of recovery, and both upfront and long-term costs are all parameters that will need to be considered.
In this article, we’ll cover the essentials of backups for small businesses, and hope that you’ll feel empowered to make decisions about the type of backup that might be right for your business.
What Are Backups?
Backups are copies of important data, files, or disk drives that are stored separately from the original data. They serve as a safeguard in case the original data becomes lost, corrupted, or otherwise inaccessible.
Backups can be created on various media, including:
- External Hard Drives: Physical drives that store backup copies.
- Cloud Storage: Online services that securely store data off-site.
- Network-Attached Storage (NAS): Devices connected to a network that allow multiple users to store and retrieve data. Note that NAS can be used both/either to provide additional or shared storage and also to provide space for backups. NAS drives used for storage can also be backed up!
- Dedicated Backup Software: Tools designed to automate and manage the backup process. Under the hood, backup software commonly uses cloud-based or local storage hardware.
The goal of backups is to ensure that a business can restore its data to a previous state in the event of data loss, system failure, cyberattacks, or other disasters.
Why Are Backups Important to Small Businesses?
There are many reasons why backups are important to small businesses. Here are some of the most common:
- Data Loss Prevention:
Small businesses often rely on digital data for day-to-day and long-term operations. Losing customer records, financial data, or proprietary information can disrupt operations or, in the worst case scenario, lead to business closure. Backups provide a means to recover this data quickly. - Disaster Recovery:
Whether it’s a natural disaster, a hardware or software malfunction, or a ransomware attack, data disasters can strike a business unexpectedly. With proper backups in place, small businesses can mitigate their risk, restore their systems and data, reduce downtime and eliminate or reduce potential revenue losses. - Cybersecurity:
If a computer, server, or network is successfully attacked, the attacker may be able to delete, manipulate, or even encrypt important data. The latter is the basis for ransomware. A solid backup strategy allows businesses significantly reduce the risks associated with many types of cyber attacks. We consider backups to be a critical part of many small business’ overall cybersecurity strategy. - Compliance and Legal Requirements:
Many industries have legal requirements regarding data retention and privacy. Backups can help small businesses comply with these regulations by ensuring that data is securely stored and can be retrieved if needed for audits or legal proceedings. Businesses that aren’t required to adhere to compliance standards can also be benefited by using them as operational frameworks, in order to keep them and their customers as safe as possible. - Business Continuity:
Regular backups are a key component of a comprehensive business continuity plan. They help ensure that even in the worst-case scenario, the business can resume its operations with minimal interruption.
Backups Are More Important for Some Small Businesses Than Others
It’s important to recognize that not all businesses need backups. The importance of backups depends on the nature of the business. Businesses that don’t require backups to adhere to compliance standards need to decide for themselves how important they are.
Here are some examples of businesses for whom backups are often more important:
- Data-Intensive Businesses:
Companies that rely heavily on digital data—such as e-commerce platforms, software as a service (SaaS) providers, and IT service companies—face significant risks if data is lost or compromised. For these businesses, backups are critical to maintain service continuity and protect customer information. Sometimes it can be difficult to determine whether or not a business is data intensive. As an example, photographers often regard their livelihood as being highly reliant on backups. Loss of the data on an important drive could represent the total loss of years of work in a single incident. In fact, the demands of digital photography have helped pushed the development of backup technologies – a fact that might be surprising to many. - Industries That Handle Sensitive Data:
Businesses like medical practices, law firms, and financial institutions – and sometimes, their partners, suppliers, and customers – all handle highly sensitive and confidential data. The loss or breach of such data can result in severe legal and financial repercussions, making robust backup solutions essential. - Businesses with Limited IT Resources:
Small businesses that lack dedicated IT staff may be more vulnerable to data loss due to human error or misconfiguration. For these businesses, having a backup system in place can be important to mitigate potential risks. We’ve seen many cases in which small business relies on a single computer or account, and is crippled when that computer or account gets compromised. - Startups and Growing Businesses:
As startups and rapidly growing businesses scale up, the volume of critical data increases. Implementing a robust backup strategy early on can prevent major setbacks as the business expands and becomes more dependent on its digital assets.
Common Types of Backups
Small businesses have several backup options at their disposal, which can broadly be categorized based on where and how the data is stored.
Local Backups
Historically, the most common category was local backups. Local backups are stored on physical media within or near the business premises, such as external hard drives, network-attached storage (NAS) devices, or even tape drives.
Local backups are typically fast to execute and restore, offering quick access to data when needed.
However, because the data is stored on-site, it may be vulnerable to the same physical threats that could impact the business, such as theft, fire, or natural disasters. Additionally, local backups typically require the business to purchase, install, and maintain dedicated hardware. While the overall cost may not be prohibitive, the complexity involved with local backups may present an obstacle that leads many businesses to selecting remote backups instead.
Remote Backups
On the other hand, remote or cloud-based backups involve sending data over the internet to offsite servers maintained by a backup service provider.
These solutions often use secure, redundant storage systems that provide geographical separation from the primary business location. Cloud backups offer advantages in terms of disaster recovery, as the physical separation minimizes the risk of a single event wiping out both the primary data and its backup.
Additionally, cloud backup solutions are usually scalable and can be automated, reducing the manual intervention needed to keep backups current.
They also don’t require the small business to install or maintain dedicated hardware locally. This can reduce costs and operational complexity for the business.
One downside to cloud backups that is often overlooked is that they are typically slower and require a consistent internet connection, often for several hours a day. They are a great fit when the system on which the backup is taken, will consistently be online. But for systems that are only occasionally online, they may not be the ideal choice.
Combining Local and Remote Backups – The Hybrid Approach
Many small businesses choose a hybrid approach that leverages both local and remote backups. This strategy can be more expensive, but it takes advantage of the fast recovery times offered by local backups while also benefiting from the offsite protection of cloud-based solutions.
By diversifying the backup locations and methods, small businesses can build a more resilient data protection strategy that minimizes the risks associated with data loss, whether due to hardware failure, human error, or catastrophic events.
Overall, the selection of backup types depends on the specific needs, resources, and risk assessments of the small business. Local backups provide speed and control, cloud backups offer strong protection against physical site risks, and a combination of these methods can create a robust, layered defense against data loss.
File vs. Image-Based Backups For Small Businesses
File-based backups focus on individual files or folders, allowing you to back up specific data and, if necessary, restore just the items that are needed. This provides a high level of granularity, which can be useful when you only need to recover a particular document or a set of files and aren’t concerned about backing up an entire system. Additionally, file-based backups generally consume less storage space and often cost less than image-based backups. However, file-based backups require more management since the customer needs to decide what to include in the backup and ensure that everything that they want backed up, is included. If disaster strikes and a critical file or folder wasn’t included in the backup, then that data is likely lost.
Image-based backups, on the other hand, create an exact snapshot of an entire system or disk. This includes the operating system, installed applications, configuration settings, and all data on the drive. The benefit of image-based backups is that they enable a complete or partial system recovery, which can be invaluable if a system failure occurs or if there is a need to quickly restore a full working environment. For small businesses, this can translate to less downtime and a faster return to operations, since the entire system can be restored without the need to reinstall and reconfigure software from scratch.
Modern image-based backup solutions also typically offer the ability to restore individual files. From the perspective of the customer, they are able to either restore critical files and data or the entire system as needed. By backing up the entire system, the business ensures that all files and data can be restored. This makes them the more robust and secure option when compared with file-based backups. Image-based backups also don’t require any maintenance
However, image-based backups do have downsides. They typically require more storage space and bandwidth, and they might take longer to create or restore compared to file-based backups. For a small business that primarily needs to safeguard critical documents or a limited set of data, a file-based approach might be more efficient and cost-effective. Conversely, if the business relies on specific software configurations and an integrated system environment, the benefits of being able to restore the entire system rapidly might outweigh the additional storage and management requirements of image-based backups.
Our Take On File vs. Image-Based Backups
Having dealt professionally with a range of backup solutions, we have our own opinion on file vs. image backups. We’ll provide it here.
In general, we recommend that small businesses who require backups, use full-image backups whenever possible. This is largely because the value proposition of full-image backups is very high while the cost is surprisingly low.
The primary value that we find is that a full-image backup guarantees the recoverability of important files as necessary. With file-based backups, the customer needs to manage the backup system, including what gets backed up. This inevitably leads to failure. By maintaining a backup of the entire system, our clients can rest assured that their critical files are all being backed up and able to be recovered.
While file backups can be cheaper than image-based backups, we’re able to offer our customers an extremely high-value solution for just a few dollars per month, per system. In our opinion, the value of this far exceeds the small amount of money that a company can save by opting for file backups at the expense of image-based backups.
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) Solutions
BCDR stands for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery, and a BCDR backup is part of a strategy that ensures a business can quickly resume operations after an unexpected event.
BCDR backups go beyond simply saving copies of data—they are integrated into a broader plan designed to maintain critical business functions during and after a disruption. For a small business, investing in BCDR means preparing for a variety of potential issues, from cyberattacks and hardware failures to natural disasters or other crises that could jeopardize daily operations.
Practically speaking, BCDR is often synonymous with high-performance backups that are integrated with features like near-instant, virtual drive based recovery. The support level for BCDR products is often considerably higher than that of standard backups.
A small business might choose to invest in BCDR backup to minimize downtime and avoid the significant costs and reputational damage that can result from data loss or system outages. The idea is to have a resilient system where data is not only backed up regularly but is also stored in a way that supports rapid recovery.
This approach often includes offsite storage and may leverage cloud-based solutions to ensure that data remains accessible even if local infrastructure is compromised. In doing so, the business protects its operations and customer trust, ensuring that it can continue to serve its clients and meet regulatory or compliance requirements even in the face of unexpected disruptions.
RAID vs. Backup
“RAID” stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, and while RAID is sometimes mistakenly thought of as a form of backup, it is actually a technology designed to improve storage reliability and performance by spreading data across multiple physical disks. In a RAID configuration, the data is distributed in such a way that if one disk fails, the system can continue operating by reconstructing lost data using the remaining disks.
This redundancy helps prevent downtime due to hardware failure and can also improve data read and write speeds, depending on the RAID level used.
It’s important to understand that RAID is not a substitute for a proper backup strategy. Although RAID protects against the failure of a disk or even multiple disks (in some RAID configurations), it does not safeguard against other types of data loss such as accidental deletion, file corruption, malware attacks, or catastrophic events like fires or floods.
A RAID array may keep a business running smoothly when hardware issues arise, but if data is compromised or deleted, RAID alone won’t be able to recover it. That’s why businesses still need to maintain regular backups—both on-site and off-site—to ensure that their data is secure under all circumstances.