Disaster Recovery: Backup options for Personal, Startups, and Small to Medium Businesses
FACT: 60% OF SMALL BUSINESSES WILL CLOSE WITHIN HALF A YEAR OF BEING VICTIMIZED BY CYBER CRIME. (SOURCE: MCAFEE)
In my last blog post, “Is your business Cyber Security ready?: 7 things you need to look into” , I wrote that one of the key things for small to medium businesses is to have a solid backup plan. Online backups are the best second line defense against the most prevalent cyber attack – Ransomware.
In this blog, I write about backup plan options for personal/startups, small, and medium businesses. Here, we solely look at cloud backup solutions, as they are cheap, secure and efficient options, regardless of the size of the organization.
Online-backup vs. Online-syncing:
Before we start, let us understand the difference between Online-backup vs Online-syncing:
Online-backup Services continually backup each and every file on your computer to a safe offsite data center (on the cloud), whereas, Online Syncing Services (ex: OneDrive, Google Drive, DropBox etc.) only syncs items in designated folders, so that users can access the data from any device.
In this article, we focus on the online backup services (not the syncing services), because in case of an irreversible disaster such as hard drive failure or a RansomWare attack, you would want to completely wipe out your computer and restore all the files from your backup instead of worrying about which folders were synced and which were not synced.
Personal/Startup Businesses:
If you have one laptop for your personal use or if you are a startup, with 1-10 employees following are a few reliable, affordable online backup options:
Bottom line: For personal/startups, both CrashPlan and BackBlaze versions will work very well, as they are very easy to setup and use. While BackBlaze beats CrashPlan on pricing, CrashPlan has an edge over BackBlaze for recovery and restoration of files. In the end, you can’t go wrong with either option.
“For just $5 per month, you can purchase a continuous, automatic data backup plan and get the peace of mind of not losing your data should something happen to your laptop/PC”
Small Businesses:
If you are a small business with 10 – 100 employees, the following are a few options to consider for your back up plan:
Two-factor backup plan: In addition to one of the above cloud (online) backup solution, we strongly recommend you to have a second-level backup option to secure your content. For example, every week/month depending on the content produced, backup your content to an off-line hard-drive. This will act as a fail-safe, should your online backup go offline due to power outages etc.
Medium Businesses:
For businesses between 100 – 1000 employees, the following are a few viable backup options:
If your organization has closer to 1000 employees (than 100), you probably have a full-time IT staff supporting your business. It is the responsibility of your head of technology to develop and implement a comprehensive disaster recovery plan that encompasses redundant data backups for your organization.
Note: Vendors such as SOS, SugarSync, OpenDrive, and Zoolz are also viable options for online backup services, but, we didn’t take those into our evaluation.
Our Recommendation:
There are so many backup plan vendors in the market. Depending on the size of your organization, we recommend the following options:
Disclosure: Neither the author nor Acuvity Consulting has any affiliation to any of the recommended products/vendors.
Conclusion:
For personal and startups, you cannot go wrong with CrashPlan or BackBlaze. If you do not want to spend the $6 per month with CrashPlan, you can always buy a cheap hard drive and manually backup all your data using the CrashPlan software for free. For Small Businesses with multiple devices, CrashPlanPro is the most efficient, secure option and for medium businesses BackBlaze Business and Code 42 (from CrashPlan) work equally well in our opinion.
Please contact Acuvity Consulting at 203 614 9070, if you need a Disaster Recovery Plan for your organization.
About the Author: Venkat Avasarala, is the Founder and CEO of Acuvity Consulting, a leader in Business Strategy and Technology.
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