Data backup can be a costly and time-consuming exercise for any business, regardless of its size. The problem is that, by its very nature, a business produces an enormous amount of data — customer contact details, financial records, email databases, employee documents; the list is almost never-ending.

Accordingly, many small businesses simply don’t pay enough heed to the process of data backup.

“The reality is, today most organisations who use IT have a very high reliance on the information that they hold within their systems,” says Steve Martin, director for small business, AU/NZ at Symantec.

“In a recent survey that we completed on disaster-preparedness for Australian businesses, only 23% of SMBs are backing up their business data on a daily basis,” says Martin.

If your business harbours an insurmountable level of data, it’s a mistake to put off data backup due to time and budget constraints. Instead, figure out what data is most crucial for rebooting your business when and if its hardware fails, and focus your backup attentions on that.

Types of data

“It really depends upon what they deem as important,” says David Deakin, national practice manager for data management at Thomas Duryea Consulting. “If recovering a business in the case of a failure is important, then doing backups geared around recovering their actual infrastructure is a good place to start.”

By infrastructure, Deakin is referring to the actual mechanisms involved in how a business uses its data. It’s possible to create an ‘image-level’ backup of a system that allows the business to recover that system very quickly.

“System backups basically allow you to back up the operating system and the application executables,” he explains. “The system backups allow you to restore the system in the case of a disaster such as operating system corruption, loss of the server, or loss of the site.”

Deakin advises that systems data should only be retained in the short term, as it typically doesn’t contain information that changes much, meaning more frequent back up would simply result in multiple copies of the same thing. Software such as VMWare, Backup Exec, and Commvault are often used for system backups.

“If a system blows up, we can recover it within an hour or two,” says Deakin. “That gets the service back up and running, but it may not be the best way to recover data. In the likes of email, for example; it's very difficult to do an image-level back up of email.”

Businesses that are more service and process-based might need to place more emphasis on their systems than on data. Heavily regulated businesses that handle a lot of data, such as financial institutions and medical and legal practices, are best to commit the same amount of time and budget to backing up their data as well.

Which data is more important?

If you’re looking to save time and money on data backup, you need to establish what data is most important for your business, knowledge that Deakin claims is surprisingly uncommon in most organisations.

“I find that a lot of organisations don't really understand which of their data is actually important,” he says. “They tend to put this whole sleeping frame in there that'll keep everything for five or seven years, but they don't actually understand what they need to keep.”

There are two things to take into consideration when finding out which data is most important to a business. Firstly, the business needs to understand the risk of losing data, and this risk needs to be assessed for each different data type, be it email, company files, or customer databases.

“How much can you tolerate to lose?” asks Deakin. “If you're an online retailer, what is the cost going to be to your business if you go down? First, understand what that is in dollars and cents terms.”

Secondly, investigate what legal obligations the data might carry for the business.

“It's not well known, but every organisation in Australia has an obligation to retain data,” says Deakin. “The Financial Transactions Act stipulates a five year retention of financial data. HR Regulations  stipulate seven. Some organisations that are publicly listed or float on the ASX have got a fifteen year retention of board minute meetings, for example.”

The nature of the business will dictate where to look for laws that bind its use of data. An online retail business dealing with customers’ credit card information would have PCI considerations, as well as obligations around financial reporting.

What type of solution should you use?

“Invest in backup technology that automates your backup process,” suggests Symantec’s Martin. “Automation is key to ensuring backups are done regularly or in the timeframe that you want.”

It’s also wise to avoid keeping different types of data in different media.

“The first thing is to avoid complexity,” says Martin. “Look at one platform that manages all of your options. If you're having to run multiple platforms on multiple strategies in different technologies, that adds complexity, and especially in a small business environment, that's not going to work.”

This isn’t to say that all of a business's data should be kept in only one location, on one specific type of medium – be it an external hard drive, offsite servers, or in the cloud – just that it's best not to segment the data into separate locations. Instead, keep whatever is important to the business backed up in its entirety in more than one place, be it on or offline.

“Equally important is to make sure that your data is in multiple locations,” acknowledges Martin. “I think the events that happened in Brisbane last month highlight that if I had a fantastic business sitting on the Brisbane river, that even if I was backing up every day to a secondary disk in my own office, both my database and my backup would've been underwater.”

TD Consulting’s Deakin specifies two particular file forms for physical backups that accommodate the potential of long-term use.

“The industry has adopted are a read-only, archive quality pdf, as well as storage methods that support Extensible Access Method (XAM), a method by which you store the data but in a format that allows it to be moved to multiple locations. You can store it on this medium now, when that becomes obsolete you can move it to somewhere else.”

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