Create and Maintain Backups

The quickest, easiest, and cheapest way to get back to business in the event of an attack, or any sort of disruption—manmade or otherwise—is to have current backups available. Back up your data regularly. Store copies of that data off-line, and if you’re particularly cautious, off-site. Backups are not a sexy or sophisticated security solution, but a standard, often mundane, task. Yet the value of a current backup can be, in the right circumstances, the sum total value of your digital life.

Backups are one of those things, like checking a car’s fluid levels, which have the potential to save you a lot of grief and inconvenience. Backups allow you to quickly get back to normal if a system crashes or if your systems fall prey to a ransomware infection.

Where should you store your backups? If your life or business is such that you need to be back online in hours, store your daily copies (on physical media) locally, under lock and key.  Store weekly or monthly copies off-site somewhere. A safe deposit box works just fine if you don’t have a lot of media to store, but really any physically secure and climate controlled facility will do.

If you are concerned at all about ransomware, make sure you configure your backup system to disconnect from the network or power off once backups are made and validated, or schedule backups to run just before you leave for the day, and power off or manually disconnect the system. (You don’t want the ransomware to infect your regular systems and your backups).

Resources

The Beginner’s Guide to PC Backup

Geared more towards individuals, but addresses issues like email and other data—not just user-created files—you might want to consider:

https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2363057,00.asp

Outsourcing Backups

If you want to let someone else do the heavy lifting when it comes to backing up data, look at services such as Backblaze (www.backblaze.com) or Carbonite (www.carbonite.com), which will back up data in real-time, leaving you time to focus on your work, not on becoming an expert in archiving. A note of caution: services like these require Internet connectivity to work. If you find yourself in a situation where you need to restore your system from backups but lack connectivity (e.g. after a hurricane when you’re running on generators, but Internet service hasn’t been restored), you could be out of luck until you can get back online.