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Whether you’re solo or scaling, here’s our go-to list of tools (some free, some freemium) that help you eliminate repetitive tasks, save time, and run your business more efficiently — without the bloat or overwhelm.
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World Backup Day 2023
On 31st March, Aussies and many individuals around the globe will be celebrating World Backup Day. Take time to consider what you would do if your photos, contacts, and important documents disappeared without warning. All of your irreplaceable digital files will be lost for good if you don’t have backup data.
Data loss happens more often than you may realize. So, if you want to safeguard your important files, regularly backing them up is the ideal solution. Instead of storing all of your valuable files in one place, keep a copy elsewhere. In the event that your computer or device crashes, goes missing, or is attacked by some malware, you can be sure that your precious data will be safe.
In Savannah, GA, there are old federal buildings, such as the historic Davenport Museum, and Georgian houses like The Olde Pink House. And there’s the cotton exchange, a Romanesque-style building, in the historical area of Savannah. Let’s not forget the classic McArchitecture style we have all come to know and love. There are over 300 years of buildings in the area and all lovingly restored.
Bringing Back Something That’s Lost
Restoration is an incredible thing to bring back something that was lost. When it comes to data, restoration can be a lifesaver but you need to be prepared. Just like with buildings, you need to create something with a strong foundation in the first place, so ultimately you’re left with something to recover rather than just a pile of junk.
What’s the Best Way to Backup Your Data?
There are lots of ways to backup your data. I’m often asked what’s the best option, but to be honest, it varies from person to person and from business to business. For one client, just having a USB stick with a few files in it might be fine. For another client, we might be discussing something like bare metal recovery with daily incremental backups at an off-site centre.
But no matter what your needs are, there’s one thing I can tell everyone: act now! The more prepared you are, the less damage that is done when you lose your data. Back up, be organised, and build systems and strong foundations so your data and your legacy can be around for years to come.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on 19th September 2019. It has been revamped and updated for accuracy and to reflect recent trends.
Need help with your data backup? Contact us for custom tech solutions for your small business starting at $1.
The 3-2-1 Rule and Other Data Protection Strategies
As companies expand and start-ups take the plunge, they need to be extra careful in protecting their data.
Most data is sensitive and must be strictly guarded. Otherwise, loss of data can be a fatal mistake for a business, so IT has a very important job: data protection. However, regardless of the number of mechanisms you put in place and the number of precautionary steps you take, data protection is only as good as your best data backup strategy.
Thanks to technology, there are many ways in which you can get an effective onsite and off-site backup for all of your data, both on your premises and in the cloud.
The 3-2-1 Rule
One of the best practices followed in data protection and backup strategies is the 3-2-1 rule. With this rule, all businesses are advised to have 3 backups stored on at least 2 different kinds of media with 1 copy being stored off-site.
Have 3 backups stored on at least 2 different kinds of media onsite and 1 copy being stored off-site.
3 Prerequisites to an Effective Data Protection and Backup Strategy
There are three main prerequisites to having an effective data backup strategy.
1. Identify Sensitive Data
Not all data is equally sensitive. Some data is redundant so it’s not really needed. Before you choose a data protection and backup strategy, the first thing to do is to identify the data that is crucial to running your business.
2. Prioritise and Segregate
Once you have identified which data is critical, it’s time to sort it in order of priority. The data which is on top of the ladder has to get full attention. As you go down, the data will become less and less sensitive, but it will still need extra care.
3. Know Your Third-Parties
There are many other people who have access to your data—maybe not to all of it, but some of it. Check out all of the third parties that have access to your data and review their security setup and backup measures. In the long run, this will make your work of data protection a lot easier.
5 Data Protection and Backup Strategies in a Hybrid Environment
Creating data backups on hard drives and keeping them under lock and key is an age-old method to preserve and protect data. Although it sounds like a good idea, this method is no longer sufficient. What are the options available today and which of those are really effective? To answer this question, let’s study some data protection and backup strategies.
1. On-Premise Versus Cloud
There was a time when organisations had their own servers. Some, very few, still have their own server today. These companies would create data backups on their own servers.
If you have strong firewalls and other precautionary measures in place, creating data backups on your own servers is a good idea. In hindsight, all the data is now in one place, so a person who gains unauthorised access into your server will have everything at his disposal to create mischief.
Storing your data in the cloud is a good option because your data is stored in a virtual world and relatively hard to access. It does not involve your servers and can be accessed from anywhere.
A good data backup and data protection strategy would be to divide the data, with some of it on your servers while keeping the others on the cloud.
2. Cloud-to-Cloud Backup
Instead of keeping all of your beers in one esky, you can distribute them into different ones. You take the data from a production environment and store it in another public cloud environment. Data in one cloud is backed up and stored in another cloud. Effectively speaking, you separate the fault domains for your backup data and production data.
The key to having an effective backup and data protection strategy in a hybrid environment lies in data separation.
3. Snapshot Backup
A point-in-time backup is known as a snapshot. It is almost like snapping a picture of all of your data at a given point in time. Cloud backups, in reality, are a snapshot. Creating a virtual image of your machines allows hassle-free rollback to the last saved snapshot.
4. Full Backup and Incremental Backup
In this data protection and backup strategy, you need to do a full backup—all of the data is backed up. When you are creating a data backup for the first time for any source, it makes sense to create a complete backup.
However, creating the entire backup again and again as you move ahead in time is a wasteful activity. It also impacts your efficiency as you continue to do redundant work, so once you have created a full backup, what you need to do is have incremental backups. In incremental backups, only the changes since the last complete backup are saved. In the cloud, storage has a value.
5. Versioning
It is also important to have backup versions available. Say you updated your software to its most current version. When you did that, unknowingly, you made some changes to a file that contained some important data. The problem due to these changes will arise after some time, not immediately. In such a case, if you have backed up the older version, you will be able to recover the file with the original data where no changes have been made.
Data Protection and Backup Strategy That Suits Your Business
Once you’ve identified the backup strategy that suits your business the most, you can go ahead with it. The important thing to consider here is the Restore Point Objective (RPO). This is the amount of data that a business can lose yet withstand its repercussions. In business terms, it would mean losing say 90 minutes of data because your automatic backup happens every 89 mins.
The other thing to consider is the Restore Time Objective (RTO). This is the time it takes for the RPO to get restored. Based on this information, you can even choose how often you want the backup procedures to run automatically.
The Final Word
In the end, backups are essential for all businesses. In the hour of need, they will become your saving grace. However, creating backups is a costly affair. You need to fully analyse your needs prior to deciding what needs to be saved. The most effective backup strategy is that where data is prioritised and all information is not saved in a single location. Separate the locations and backup just what you need!
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on 25th January 2019. It has been revamped and updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
Need help with your data backup? Contact us for custom IT solutions for your small business starting at $1.
How to Make Sure You Have the Data You Need Every Time
We’re in unreal, crazy times at the moment, and it has to be said that a lot of people are regretting their move to the cloud.
A lot of people are loving it as well because they’re going, “Huh, you know what? Sweet, I’m in the cloud. This is great! I can access everything from home. It is good.”
Internet Speeds Are Slowing Down
The problem with cloud migration, especially when the lockdown started and everybody started working from home, is the loads increased by about 300%, not just 10% or 20% or 30%. That means we’ve seen lots of core business go up and down, which is something that wouldn’t happen if business owners spent the money on business-grade Internet connections and kept their infrastructure local.
Get Localised Copies of Your Data
Having said that, if you have made the decision to move to the cloud, it’d be a very sensible idea to make sure that you’ve got localised copies that you can set to schedule to download at night.
Whether that’s through Dropbox, OneDrive or anything like that, make sure you go out, buy bigger drives, and have everything copied locally. That way, it’s going to be much, much quicker when you go and open up that document.
Backups, Backups, and More Backups
If you want to make sure things are staying nice, quick, and efficient, these are things that you need to be keeping in mind and doing.
Keep a localised copy of the data. This has become even more important since we started seeing Internet outages and blackouts across Australia and also on an international scale.
Keep your data local and make sure you have backups. If you don’t know where your remote workforce is backing their data up to, find out. See what you can do to see where the files are going.
The Final Word
If something goes terribly wrong and your IT company blows up and disappears, where do you go to get your data backup? Where do you get all of your information?
If you’ve enjoyed this, make sure to jump across to iTunes, give us some love, and some feedback, and let us know what your thoughts are. Stay good and stay healthy.
Editor’s Note: This episode was originally published on 5th May 2020. It has been revamped and updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
Need help with your data backup? Contact us for custom IT solutions for your small business.
Maybe you’ve got cloud backup, incremental backup, bare-metal restore backup or some other hybrid backup. Maybe it’s on your workstations, maybe it’s on your server, maybe it’s on everything, it’s onsite, it’s offsite, it’s doing everything and you’ve got some other sort of RAID setup but you’re not quite sure what it does, but it has mirrors. Yeah.
Any of that stuff may mean nothing to you, but a lot of people think they’ve got backup maybe as part of their Business Continuity Plan and Disaster Recovery Plan, but they don’t. They just think they’ve got backup, and there’s nothing there. They have their emails in the cloud, and they think, ‘Well, the cloud’s secure. Someone else is backing that up. Not my responsibility anymore.’ The truth is, kind of is, eh?
If you’ve got Xero accounts and something goes wrong with Xero, it’s your responsibility to keep your records for seven years, not theirs.
So you need to make sure you’ve got a backup of your files.
Why You Should Back Up Your Data
You might be like, ‘Nah, they’re never going to go down. What are you talking about? It’s Xero, mate.’ Yeah, they do. People do. Companies go down. You can’t help it. It’s a thing. It’s a way of life.
You need to have a backup. You don’t know if things are going to disappear off the Earth. I’m sure if something like that happened, the ATO would help you out a bit, but it’s still something important that you need to make sure you’ve got a backup of everything.
Data Loss Is a Nightmare
There are different types of backup. You can have your computer or your workstation backed up. That could be something as simple as dragging and dropping your files from your documents folder onto a USB stick if you’re old school. But that’s means you’ve got backup of only a few of your files. If your whole computer was destroyed, you’d still lose all your licences, you’d lose the ability to log in because it’d be gone. You’d lose any stuff on your desktop, and any other stuff since the last time you copied your stuff on the USB stick.
Schedule Data Backup
That could be a huge problem for your business and that could mean downtime. If you need to copy things across and know that’s time wasted doing that, and it’s a task you’re not going to remember doing, you need to automate it or have some sort of system in place to monitor it. There are lots of fantastic IT companies out there that will allow you to do that sort of stuff, and they’ll monitor it for you. They’ll make sure that you’ve got hourly backups, daily backups, quarterly backups, whatever’s required.
Make your business downtime-proof with our Guaranteed Uptime Plans—you get paid when you go down!
Restore Data Easily
What’s more important when you’re backing up is it’s not just a couple of files. There are all these settings and configurations and everything else that you know goes into when you get a computer and you go, ‘Uh, that took them hours.’ It’s going to take them hours again. So you need to make sure that if you’ve got a full backup, your IT company should be able to click on the backup for whatever you want to restore, click ‘Restore’ and go back to what it was an hour ago or a day ago, or whenever the problem wasn’t there. That’s what you want.
Have All Versions Backed Up
The other thing that backup protects you against is if you’re just copying your files across, you only have that version that you’ve copied across. Backup gives you the backup of every version that you’ve got, from then all the way through to when the backups were first archived. So you could potentially have someone that has an Excel document, and they’re there tapping away at the Excel document, doing their thing, and they have a fault in it. That could have happened a month ago. You can now go back to that backup and go, “Ah, yeah, that’s the version here.” That’s what you want.
The Final Word
So there are different types of backup. Some’s file backup, some’s hardware backup, some’s backup that goes to the cloud. Some are backups that go through the cloud or through your internet connection to your home address or to another business, or an offsite location. But there are lots of different types of backup. Make sure that you are backed up, with your hardware if it’s important, with your software if that’s important, and overall with everything if you don’t want to have any downtime. If you have any questions about it, feel free to contact us and I will personally answer them for you. Stay good.
Has the cloud changed how we update our hardware? It’s a great question that we’re asked. People seem to think that because all their data is in the cloud, they don’t need to upgrade their computers and they can just use the cheapest, dirtiest piece of thing that they’ve ever seen. The truth is you can’t. If anything, it needs to be more powerful than before and the reason is with all your stuff in a traditional sense, when there was a server that was hyper-powered super duper and it allowed for any of the things that needed to be done, that is where the processing house was and then what would happen is the data would shoot through to your computer and your computer would just be a display for it really. So it didn’t need to be that powerful.
I’m on Fossil Walk in Badlands Park. It’s a pretty cool name, and this place is famous for its fossils, particularly mammals, which we’ve found lots of ancient pigs, rhinos, horses, rabbits, rodents, and plenty of others. I find it amazing that this piece of history can be preserved like this for millions of years.
When hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, New Orleans was not ready for a disaster of that scale because it always feels like you have more time to prepare until you don’t.
Whether your business is located in Australia or any other country, you can celebrate World Backup Day this March 31, 2019. This day is the perfect time to think about all of your organisation’s valuable data as well as what you would do if you lost it. In the event of a cyber-attack, malware infection, or another unforeseen event that causes data loss, having backup data can keep your business operations running smoothly.
It doesn’t take an earthquake to shake things up. It could be one suspicious download or a badly placed cup of coffee, and bye bye data! Are you ready? Do you have an IT disaster recovery plan?
The Dorks got me into my system after it was locked out and the device destined for landfill. Having worked with the Dorks team for 4 years, I have always found them responsive, helpful and diligent. Thoroughly recommend!
Josh and the entire Dorks team could not be any more professional, helpful, friendly and knowledgeable if they tried. Time and time again they were patient and went above and beyond to resolve numerous complicated IT issues for myself and my team, at all hours of the day and night. I recommend them to all size and scale of businesses, as no problem is too large for the Dorks! Thanks again Josh and I wish you and the team every success in work and in life.
There are very few organisations that have a service culture of going above and beyond. Josh Lewis, Dorks founder did that this week with myself and several peers, helping us through a difficult IT situation. Dorks Managed IT Services are relationship grounded, solution oriented and outcomes based. They are outstanding in their sector.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Joshua from Dorks on an IT issue outside of their scope, and I couldn't be more impressed. He went above and beyond to not only resolve my problem quickly on late Friday afternoon but also was very friendly and supportive. His dedication to ensuring everything was working perfectly, truly stood out. Highly recommend Joshua Lewis @Dorks for anyone needing reliable and expert IT assistance!Thank you so much Josh!
I've been a client of Dorks Delivered for many years and for good reason! They are so easy to deal with, value for money, host and manage my website, provide office software at discounted rates, easily fix website issues etc. A seamless and easy IT company to deal and communicate with that I highly recommend for all your IT needs.
These Dorks are fantastic. Always ready to solve any problem we have. Cyber-security, hardware, even tips on marketing. Josh is always approachable and friendly, and the team are top-notch!
Dorks has helped get our company IT needs on track and streamlined. They are easily contactable when problems occur and are quick to get you back up and running!
The best organisation I've work with so far. All staff are hands-on and they will understand your business in order to support you the best way possible. They are the partners you need for any kind of tech solutions. I love that they are open to two-way feedback and will let you know if something is realistic or not and what is the best solution to move forward given the circumstances. It is no surprise that they come highly recommended for me.
Very happy to recommend Dorks Delivered with Teck support etc, we worked together for over 10 years and have all issues resolved promptly.Thanks Team Dorks
Joshua Lewis is a super star. Generous of spirit, skilled as an interviewer, and gifted with the ability to see exactly what people need - I'm sure you'll enjoy dealing with Dorks Delivered.
I strongly endorse Dorks Delivered for their outstanding Managed IT Services! With a proactive and reliable team, they provide round-the-clock support and top-notch cybersecurity, making them an invaluable partner for achieving business success.
Definitely talk to Josh Lewis and the Dorks about your managed IT needs. Apart from being smart and having a great team, I have found him to be genuinely concerned about his clients, coming up with the best advice that suits their needs.
Honestly, our business wouldn't survive without them. Josh and his team just know everything and I have peace of mind when it comes to the uptime. Of my business. And they give awesome little freebies!!
We recently transferred our I.T. needs to Dorks Delivered and they have been fantastic. The response times, ease of accessibility to them and their understanding of our needs have been brilliant. It's been a complete 180 degree shift from our previous vendor Mercury I.T. We are so pleased with the change and would happily recommend Dorks Delivered to other businesses.
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In this data protection and backup strategy, you need to do a full backup—all of the data is backed up. When you are creating a data backup for the first time for any source, it makes sense to create a complete backup. 
A lot of people are loving it as well because they’re going, “Huh, you know what? Sweet, I’m in the cloud. This is great! I can access everything from home. It is good.”
Keep your data local and make sure you have backups. If you don’t know where your 
