Securing Backups

Once a computer has been backed up, it's important to make sure that the backups themselves are safe. This may seem trite, but many companies leave backup tapes just lying around the office for anyone to pick up and walk away with. There are two main principles in securing backups:

 Keep backups in a safe place.
 Keep some backups off-site.

"Keeping backups in a safe place" means keeping them away from unauthorized or unqualified people. This doesn't necessarily imply that anyone has malevolent intent, but keeping backups in a safe place just makes good organizational sense. Backups can be moved by cleaners, dropped, or broken, all because they're in the way of someone who doesn't know what they are.

By keeping some backups offsite, you're ensuring that if something happens to your primary place of work (fire, flood, break in, etc) you'll still have some (probably older) backups away from the primaries so that you won't have lost everything. If, every month, a copy of the latest backup is moved offsite, no matter what happens, no more than a month's worth of work can be lost. Keeping a backup off-site can be as simple as taking a couple of discs home with you once a month, or as complicated as getting them stored in a safe deposit box: it's your choice.

By securing your backups you'll improve the chances that you'll actually be able to find and use your backups once disaster strikes. We at Warm and Fuzzy Logic use ShadowBack to maintain continuous backups of our computers. We also store a copy of the latest backup off-site at least once a month so that we won't lose more than a month's worth of work if something happens to our offices.