Offsite backups are crucial for data security and recovery. They ensure you and your team still have access to your business’ data in the event that something happens to your devices or file systems.
I’m going to discuss why offsite backups are important and how your business can include them in your recovery plan.
What are Offsite Backups?
An offsite backup is a backup that’s stored in a remote location from where your main file system is stored.
This remote location could be a data center in another city, an external hard drive you keep at your home, or a server operated by a cloud storage provider.
Offsite backups are the exact opposite of onsite backups, which are backups you store at your primary business location, either on the devices the backups were taken on or on storage devices located on the premises (such as a NAS device).
A typical offsite backup strategy for small businesses involves transferring copies of important files to a cloud storage solution like Google Drive.
Why are Offsite Backups Important?
As long as backups are important, offsite backups will be just as important.
According to statistics on the costs of data loss, 60% of small companies go out of business within six months of a data breach (Cybercrime Magazine).
93% of companies who lose access to their data for at least 10 days file for bankruptcy within one year of the incident.
51% of companies who experience catastrophic data loss go out of business within two years of the incident while 43% never reopen (UniTrends).
This is why it’s so important for businesses to have a solid backup system in place, but why exactly are offsite backups important?
Offsite backups strengthen your company’s backup and recovery plan by adding redundancy to it, meaning your business can still operate even when data loss does occur.
If cybersecurity threats, such as malware, hardware failure, a natural disaster, or human error (someone deletes a crucial file) cause a data loss to your primary storage location, you can recover that data from your offsite backups.
Why Offsite Backups Should Only Be Part of Your Backup Plan
Offsite backups are vital to the longevity of your business, but they shouldn’t be your only backup solution.
They should be part of a robust backup and recovery system that includes offsite backups as a fallback.
At minimum, your business should have two backup solutions:
- Onsite backup where files are backed up to storage devices located at your place of business
- Offsite backup where files are stored in a separate location from your place of business
Ideally, you’d have a third backup solution that’s not connected to the internet at all and is only accessible by senior members of your organization. This kind of backup gives you access to your data during outages and protects your business’ most sensitive files from intentional sabotage.
Here are a few tips for developing a better backup strategy:
- Create backups regularly. New but very important files should be backed up immediately
- Review available storage on backup devices regularly
- Develop a routine for updating old files and deleting unused files
- Save space by deleting duplicate files on the same storage device
- Try to keep between 20 and 30% of your backup devices’ storage space free
- Train your employees on how to back up their data properly and access backups
- Choose backup tools that allow you to automate backups
- Run backups after hours to prevent drops in productivity
- Test your backup plan to measure how fast it takes you to access different backup devices and restore data
- Train employees on how to recognize phishing attempts and other cybersecurity threats
Related: Best Practises for Secure Data Backup
What are the Different Types of Offsite Backups?
There’s not much difference between onsite backups and offsite backups outside of where they’re stored.
That means they share a set of backup types:
- Full backup – Creates a complete copy of every file you want to back up
- Incremental backup – Only copies changes that were made since the last backup
- Differential backup – Only copies changes that were made since the last full backup
Full backups should be done at least once.
After all, the choice between incremental and differential backups is dependent on the needs of your organization.
Generally, incremental backups are faster to create but take longer to restore while differential backups are the exact opposite.
If your data is crucial and being without it, even for a few hours, would hurt your bottom line, you’re better off choosing differential backups so you can restore your data faster in a crisis.
If you find yourself needing to create backups during peak productivity hours, you’re better off choosing incremental backups.
What Offsite Backup Solutions Do Businesses Use?
Most small businesses rely on cloud storage solutions for offsite backups.
Some back up data to external hard drives or USBs, then transport them to secure locations (usually a founder’s house if the business is pretty small).
Large businesses, especially enterprise-size businesses, use data centers filled with high-powered servers specially built to store and protect a business’ data.
For most small businesses, cloud storage does just fine.
Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, and Amazon Web Services work just fine for most businesses.
Other solutions include Carbonite, Dropbox Business, Veeam, and Backblaze B2.
Here are a few tips for choosing a cloud storage provider:
- Decide which data needs long-term storage and what can be safely deleted or archived
- Determine how much data you currently need to back up
- Determine how much new data you need to back up on a monthly basis
- Consider which file types your data includes. PDFs and Word documents take up much less space than media files, for instance
- Research cloud storage solutions thoroughly to see if they charge customers extra fees for large data transfers and other processes
- If your data usage is unpredictable, stick with pay-as-you-go pricing plans rather than costly fixed plans
- Choose a secure storage solution that provides end-to-end encryption, multi-factor authentication, and compliance certifications important to your organization (HIPAA for medical organizations, for instance)
- Choose a storage solution that offers automatic backups
- Choose a storage solution that offers data recovery features
How an Offsite Backup Saved Toy Story 2
Toy Story 2 released in theaters in the fall of 1999, but did you know that the film was nearly lost a year prior?
Source: Pixar
In 1998, one of the film’s animators entered a deletion command code on the root folder for the film’s assets, which were located on Pixar’s internal servers.
The command code was /bin/rm -r -f * for our more tech-savvy readers out there. It instructs the system it’s entered on to delete every file beneath the current directory.
In this case, the animator had run the code in the film’s root directory.
As Oren Jacob told The Next Web, “Pixar being a wide-open Unix environment meant that it was very promiscuous. You could [change directory] ‘slash’, net ‘slash’, or walk across the network and log into Ed Catmull’s machine or Steve Job’s machine if you wanted to. Not that Steve ever did do any work on the film directly, but you could do that.”
The data loss was first noticed by Oren who worked as an associate director on the film. He was working alongside fellow associate director Larry Aupperle in another colleague’s office when the pair noticed that character models for lead character Woody were disappearing from the film’s directory file.
Oren was eventually promoted to Chief Technical Officer and then Director of Tools at Pixar. He now works as a Senior Director at Roblox.
Source: Instagram
Back to Toy Story 2, by the time the crew working on the film shut down the film’s file servers, 90% of the film, accounting for two years worth of work, had been deleted.
It was only during this crisis that the crew working on the film discovered that the server’s backups had not been functioning correctly for at least a month.
As The Next Web explains, the film’s backups were stored on tape drives (it was 1998, after all), which allowed for a maximum file size of 4GB (again, 1998).
As the film’s files exceeded these maximums, new data was being written to the drives as they normally would, but old data was being pushed out to accommodate them.
Fortunately, at least one crew member, technical director Gayle Susman, was working from home to care for her newborn son Eli.
Source: The Next Web
She had a near complete copy of the film on her computer, allowing the crew to recover the majority of the film, aside from work that had not been transferred to her, yet.
As Oren told The Next Web,
“She and I just stood up and walked out, back to her Volvo, drove across the bridge, got the machine, got some blankets, I hugged it with seatbelts, across the back seat. Drove at like 35 with blinking lights on, hoping to get a police escort. No cops saw us, so it didn’t help us.
Eight people met us with a plywood sheet out in the parking lot and, like a sedan carrying the Pharaoh, walked it into the machine room.”
The film was saved, and although a lot of additional work and rework was done between this time and its final release, Toy Story 2 went on to become a very successful sequel. It had a budget of $90 million and generated over $511 million at the box office.
More importantly, Pixar learned a very valuable lesson about data security, monitoring backups, and the importance of an offsite backup.
