Off Site Data Backup Best Practices To Consider

When planning backup and recovery strategy, few items are as important as determining a safe and secure location to store Off Site Data Backup media. The central purpose in having backup media stored offsite is to protect the data from being damaged by the same local event as would cause you to have a need to restore from it to continue business operations. A good example of this would be where the place of business suffered a data loss due to fire, flood or theft. Having the backup data stored in the same location as the computer system that it backed up would not always protect the data, but having the backup media stored at a geographically remote location would help to protect it and thus, would allow the data to be kept safe under most circumstances.

Another need of paramount importance is data privacy, ensuring the privacy of data against the prying eyes of unauthorized persons or entities. That means that in addition to locating a safe location to keep the backup media, the backup media itself should have some safeguards built into it. Those safeguards can be a mixture of mechanical processes such as lock boxes and fire safes for the media and non-physical safeguards such as data encryption on the backup media, and password protection of the backup files themselves.

We have all heard the stories of backup tapes “falling off the back of a truck” or of a backup tape being stolen from an employee or an interns car. Such events cost companies as well as state and local governments hundreds of millions of dollars a year in losses and in fees to help consumers watch their credit files so as not to become victims of Identity Theft.

Taking those factors into consideration, the selection of the location where the off-site data backup media should be stored should include some factors that will come into play when the need to perform a recovery is required. Two schools of thought exist for this question. One thought is that the backups need to be stored somewhere locally, within a few miles of the location of the computer systems they have backed up, so that in the event of a mechanical failure of the computer hardware, the data can be available for a restore quickly. This is where the lines tend to blur a little between an operational backup and recovery and a disaster recovery business continuance plan approach. For local disasters such as the mechanical failure of a computer system, a local copy of the data stored in the same offices as the computer system would be easy to recover from. If the building itself however, was destroyed, it’s likely that the local copy of the data would have also been destroyed.

There are several ways to solve the “where does the media stay” situation. One of the easiest is to have several backups taking place, some for Operational purposes, and some for Disaster Recovery purposes. The Operational backup media can be kept on-site and locked up in a fire proof and heat proof data safe. For those backups that are kept off-site, they too should be stored in a fireproof and heat proof safe, but the off-site aspect is used to ensure that a localized loss such as a fire or water damage would not be harmful to the long term success of the business because a copy of important data could still be recovered.

There are two other perspectives on the storage of Disaster Recovery backup media, if the loss impacts more than just a building (consider the citywide or regional effects of a fire, flood, tornado, earthquake, hurricane, or other large event) it makes sense to transport your data outside the same region. Many people consider a region to be 300 miles, so shipping media to someplace a state or two away may make sense, or transmitting it electronically may be even easier and more economical. Depending on how much off site data backup you need to store and how often the data changes, there are automatic backup systems on the marketplace to meet those needs. Opting for an electronically transmitted backup to a remote site may make the most sense in both cases, as it can be easy to recover the data wherever you need to recover it to.

Using easily available solutions today might simply be backing up to an external USB hard drive, and using an online backup service as well. The USB hard drive helps you recover files if your built-in hard drive fails or if you delete files by accident. The Internet based backup protects your data from the local and potentially regional disaster. It's the best of both worlds.