3 Critical Points Your Backup Strategy is Missing

In the IT world, hoping your backups work is a recipe for disaster. From a pro perspective, a backup that hasn't been tested is just a pile of useless data. We’ve moved past the days of just saving files to a thumb drive; today, it's about business continuity, making sure a company doesn't go bankrupt because a server died or a hacker got in.

If you want to keep a business alive, you need to know these three points.

Know Your Limits: RTO and RPO

You can’t protect a business if you don't know how much downtime it can actually survive. We use two main metrics to measure this:

• RTO (Recovery Time Objective) - This is the "How long are we down?" timer. If a website makes $10k an hour, 5-hour RTO costs you $50,000. You need to be back up in minutes.
• RPO (Recovery Point Objective) - This is the "How much did we lose?" timer. If you back up once a day at midnight, and the system crashes at 11 PM, you just lost 23 hours of work. For important stuff, you want an RPO of seconds or minutes.

Don’t Just Back Up, Test the Restore

Getting a notification that your backup is finished doesn't mean you're safe. It just means the data copied over. It doesn't mean the file isn't corrupted or that the software will actually boot up.

To be safe, you have to run tests. You should occasionally try to boot your entire business environment in a private sandbox (a safe, isolated digital area) to see if everything actually works. If it takes your team eight hours to get the apps running but your goal was two hours, you have a major problem that needs fixing before a real emergency happens.

Use the 3-2-1 Rule and Immutable Backups

Hackers today don't just lock your computer; they look for your backups and delete them first so you have to pay the ransom. To stop them, we use the 3-2-1 Rule:

3 copies of your data. 2 different types of storage (like a local server and the cloud). 1 copy off-site (in a different building or region).

The real mover here is immutability. An immutable backup is like writing in permanent marker. Once it’s saved, it cannot be changed, deleted, or encrypted by anyone (even an admin or a hacker) for a set amount of time. It’s the ultimate "undo" button.

Get a Plan That Actually Works

Old-school backups aren't enough for today’s threats. At RiverTrail Technology, we build custom recovery plans that fit your business’ specific goals so you're never left in the dark. Would you like to see if your current setup is actually solid? Give us a shout at (276) 601-3208 and we’ll help you audit your technology.