How and Where Should Data Be Backed Up?

How can you back up data you don’t want to lose? Which method is logical and safe?

There are some things we all don’t want to lose in reality and in the virtual world. Memories, pictures, songs or a graduation thesis prepared by a student with a lot of effort… We can extend this list even more. Each of these is in a valuable data category. Who wants his thesis written for weeks to disappear because it has not been backed up? Or imagine you own an engineering company. Since the project that your engineers worked on for years is not backed up, the possibility of getting lost is quite scary.

In this article, we will try to highlight the importance of backing up and how to safely preserve backups, which is more difficult and more difficult than backing up.

Backup Strategy

Whether you’re an ordinary person or an owner or employee of a company. If you have data worth backing up, you should set an appropriate backup strategy. A strategy needs to be determined in terms of both reliability and order of reserves. “Will the reserves be kept internally or externally?” or “Where and how should the data be stored?” Answering such questions according to your needs will help you create your strategy.

Backup Strategies 1: Cloud

If you are looking for a very good and reliable backup solution at home and outside, the solution you should choose should be cloud backup. Considering that you also backup locally by storing your pictures, memories or articles on trusted cloud services, you always have a third backup.

In cloud storage, which has become a billion dollar industry today, your valuable data is securely kept in their machines if it is in accordance with the policy of the companies providing this service. The best part of cloud backup solutions, and sometimes dangerously, is that you can access data remotely if you have the necessary authorization and password.

For example, you have a presentation and the flash drive with the presentation file is left at home. If you have backup in the cloud, you are lucky. You can easily get your presentation file back.

The dangerous aspect of cloud storage is that your data can be accessed without permission if the password you set for the security of your data while using this service is weak or if it is captured by others. Or, due to a security vulnerability caused by the cloud provider, your private data may leak out, and you can make the data public, even if the provider is not open.

However, after taking the necessary security measures, cloud backup is a very logical solution for companies and individual users.

There are cloud services offered by many giants such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3, IBM, Oracle cloud services at the enterprise level. Trusted cloud providers are very sensitive to security and backup retention to prevent your data from being lost or accessed remotely.

Extra care is required to preserve data if your company has only internal backup. Considering that your devices, disks and infrastructures may collapse in the event of a fire or failure, it is much more logical to have a copy of important data in cloud solutions that provide high reliability outside the company.

Cloud Backup Solutions for Individual Users

Until now, we have mentioned the use of cloud backup for corporate business rather than individual use. There are cloud services such as OneDrive, Google Drive, and DropBox for individual users. With the tools they offer, free space up to a certain capacity and simple interface, these providers provide individual users with the opportunity to back up data very easily and securely. For example, Microsoft OneDrive tool that comes with Windows is one of them.

The OneDrive tool syncs the valuable data you’ve sent to the OneDrive folder with your cloud account. With the tool, you can set the “Documents”, “Pictures”, and “Desktop” folders to be synchronized. Microsoft OneDrive offers 5 GB for free, 50 GB for $ 1.99. If you are an Office Online user, you can get 1 TB space for $ 6.99 a month or $ 69.99 a year.

In the Google ecosystem, Google Backup and Sync Tool is a rival to the OneDrive tool. You can add other folders to sync with Google Backup and Sync Tool, which stands out for being more flexible than Microsoft OneDrive. It also offers unlimited storage space by applying some compression for operations such as uploading photos. If you don’t want the photos you take to be compressed, you can try the limited Google Drive version. In the backup service, which is free of charge with unlimited capacity, pictures are compressed by reducing to 16 MP.

NAS Backup and NAS Systems

If you want a backup solution hosted on-premises or on your own network, NAS solutions are for you. Specially produced NAS disks and NAS boxes for backup and data storage purposes (called the box where the disks are placed and managing backup jobs) will do the trick.

If it will be used in a small business, our recommendation is to store data in at least two NAS systems. Although the NAS system is not completely disrupted, it is worth it if the data in question is important.

Another Backup Solution: Getting System Image

There are a number of reasons to buy an image and then set up the image instead of setting up a system cleanly from the beginning. It is often easier to do a clean install than to install the image and then do a world patch and update. System images are taken mainly for the following reasons:

To quickly get multiple computers with exactly the same configuration ready for use.

To avoid messing with post-clean tweaks and software installations.

Although system images are a practical solution, we see that Microsoft wants to abandon this habit by removing the “Backup and Restore” tool with Windows 8.

One of the beauty of the system images is that you can create a copy of other machines on the network by making the necessary configurations, and in case of failure, you can quickly restore the system from this image.

Due to the reactions, Microsoft has re-added the “Backup and Restore” feature under the “System and Security” heading under the control panel on Windows 10.

When restoring in the tool on Windows, there is no limitation option regarding the system backup. It shows the whole drive and you cannot select and upload files one by one. It asks for a network username and password for the share on the network, it does the copying to the root of the marked drive, the backup even though it has the necessary rights for all public access. For things like this, you must provide access information for the remote system.

Windows allows you to create a bootable recovery image, which is a much better option than before. Loading backups from previous versions of Windows can be quite painful. Now, an installation in recovery disc format would be much better.

Free Cloud Services

There are many free cloud storage services available today. While some offer storage in a limited space like a trial version, some offer completely unlimited storage. It is useful to stay away from unfamiliar and unlimited storage providers, because the security and privacy of your data can be compromised with insecure services. We recommend that you pay one of the large trusted providers for your very critical and important data.

The first of the more logical and secure free cloud services we can recommend is Google Photos. It will compress your photos to reduce their size (reduce the image to 16 megapixels) and allow you to back up unlimited photos if you agree to compression. It is possible to say that thanks to the compression and artificial intelligence technologies used by Google, you will not see a significant difference between the original and the compressed. Google Photos also provides storage for 1080P videos that are less than 30 minutes long. Considering that Google Photos is mostly used on mobile devices, we can understand that it has a very good video storage facility.

Another alternative to Google’s service for image storage is Flickr. You can store your high quality pictures free of charge in 1 TB space.

If you say I want to store all files, not just images, you can get free cloud storage space in certain capacities from reliable and reputable cloud providers such as Mega, OneDrive, Google Drive and DropBox, MediaFire. The services offered by these providers for free are somewhat like trial versions. If the free space is not enough and you need more, you have to pay a certain amount.

Result

In this article, we have talked about some of the corporate backup solutions, cloud storage solutions, NAS and system images. While determining your backup approach, it is best to choose the path that suits your needs and systems, as we said at the beginning of the article. Depending on what to backup, the type, path and location of the backup may vary.

While reliable free cloud storage services can be used to store an ordinary homework file or picture, on the other hand, it may make sense to take advantage of NAS solutions to back up your on-premises projects that are too valuable to keep even in the cloud, and to set up a large backup infrastructure.

The subject of our article was about backing up actively used data. Archiving and preserving data is another matter. Organizations and individuals may need to retain some data for very long periods, perhaps years. Since this is a field related to archiving and archive backup, your approach should change accordingly. If there is data that needs to be archived; You should pay attention to things like where to keep, how to keep it, and how to ensure its safety and reliability.

As a result, we think that normal cloud storage services are sufficient for individual use, and if there is a very valuable data that will require a change in the backup strategy, the approach should be shaped accordingly.