Getting ready for World Backup Day 2024

Carl D’Halluin, CTO of Datadobi, shared a reminder that “protecting your data with backups isn’t just a technical formality. Given the virtually unavoidable risks of ransomware, malicious or accidental deletions, and countless other threats – it’s absolutely crucial for the health of your business.” He also stressed that you need to understand the nature of your data, and that you can’t protect your data if you don’t understand what it is that you’re protecting. He strongly suggests “adding to that the crucial but sometimes missed step of a ‘golden copy’” (i.e., an immutable copy of your business-critical data in a secure and remote site) to support business continuity.

Oleksandr Maidaniuk, vice president of technology at Intellias, stated that “data is the virtual lifeblood of today’s organizations”, so as World Backup Day 2024 rolls around, we need to appreciate how crucial regular data backups are for keeping our businesses running without interruption, even in the face of a simple outage or a manmade or natural disaster.” He added: “implementing a seamless backup and disaster recovery (DR) strategy is easier said than done, due to the complicated interplay of technological, regulatory, and operational factors. The heterogeneous nature of data and technology platforms and the increasingly complicated and stringent compliance mandates combined with the need to minimize – if not eliminate – downtime requires a nuanced approach.”

For Linux in particular, data protection involves understanding the nature of your file systems (e.g., company data vs OS and configuration file), backing them up reliably, and ensuring that the backups are successfully completed. And there’s another important step: ensuring that your tech staff is ready and able to recover data in case of a loss. In fact, practicing data recovery, as in the style of a “fire drill,” from time to time is a very good idea.