Without a doubt, a data recovery solution is essential when it comes to maintaining security and business continuity. Backups give you important survival options when ransomware hits, a laptop is lost, or someone accidentally deletes a folder full of important files. Without those safe, secure, redundant copies of your most important data, you’d be left out in the cold.

The 3-2-1 backup rule is a strategy to ensure your data is recoverable in case of data loss incidents. It recommends having at least: The rule was conceptualized by US photographer Peter Krogh. After initially impacting the photography world, Krogh’s idea was quickly adopted by other technology disciplines. It’s a great way to evaluate and manage data risks.

Data is essential to a business, but too often the necessary precautions are not in place. Many small businesses are just one small data disaster away from going out of business. What’s worrying is that 3 out of 4 small businesses have no backup strategy or disaster recovery plan in place to prevent this from happening. This lack of preparation can bring a halt to business operations or cause an organization to go out of business.

Backups are needed for everything from restoring a lost or damaged file to completing an entire disaster recovery. Data backups require a lot of storage space, which takes up more resources and drives costs up. To make the most of this storage, businesses need to optimize their data backups. Fortunately, backup deduplication can help reduce the overall load on data storage and provide other benefits.

In an increasingly digital business world, data backup has become vital for the protection of an organization’s interest. Businesses of all sizes can get hacked or breached, and indiscriminate ransomware attacks cause countless orgs to lose their valuable data to cyberthieves every year. Even disgruntled employees or other insider threats can steal or delete their valuable digital assets.

Data disasters are practically inevitable, but a planned out backup strategy can combat their damaging effects. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) of the U.S. government is a major organization that recommends sticking to a 3-2-1 backup strategy. Follow the 3-2-1 backup rule to ensure that your data is kept safe.

Dropbox is one of the oldest names around when it comes to cloud file storage, and the company has built a reputation as a reliable platform for file sharing and collaboration. Recently, Dropbox has been taking a few sidesteps from its roots and promising secure data backup features along with its staple file sync and share. Dropbox is not alone here. Most cloud storage solutions seem to be trying their hands at backup -- if not in practice, at least in terminology.

Data loss events frequently occur, but it seems that a good portion of companies are not fully prepared for these damaging events. An Avast report states that 60% of all backups performed are incomplete and restores fail 50% of the time. An increasing number of organizations depend on digital data, so data backup and recovery should be a top priority to potentially minimize both downtime and loss of data and ensure continuity of business operations.

A while back, we wrote about the differences between backup and data protection. While the points made there are still valid, the industry’s definitions of these terms have continued to evolve, as has our thinking on the topic. At N-able, we’ve settled on a definition shared by analyst firm William Blair in a recent report: data protection solutions should include backup, disaster recovery, and archiving/retention of backups.