Backup and Restore Best Practices

Here are some guidelines for developing an effective backup strategy. Again, you should adapt and expand these suggestions to suit your organization’s requirements and goals.

• Develop backup and restoration strategies with appropriate resources and personnel, and test them. A good plan ensures that you can quickly recover your data if it is lost.
• Give the responsibilities of backup and restoration to an administrator.
• Backup the operating system information.
• Keep multiple copies of the backup media. Keep at least one copy offsite in a properly controlled environment.
• Perform a trial restoration periodically to verify that your files were properly backed up. A trial restoration can uncover hardware problems that do not show up with software verification.
• Secure both the storage device and the backup media.