What Does a Decent Data Backup Include?

If you are a subscriber and frequent reader of this newsletter, you’re probably familiar with our campaign to educate business owners, managers, and even your average worker on the importance of backing up data. In this month’s newsletter we’ll describe incremental backup and how it works as the best scenario for small business data redundancy.

Incremental data backups play a critical role by consistently protecting data without consuming excessive storage or time. Unlike full backups, which copy every file regardless of changes, incremental backups only save the data that has changed since the last backup. This approach makes them highly efficient in terms of both time and storage space, allowing businesses and individuals to maintain regular backups without the significant overhead associated with full backups. You’ll always have your full backup, but you’ll have all of your file modifications over top of it.

The efficiency of incremental backups becomes especially important for organizations that manage vast amounts of data. Performing daily full backups of large databases or file systems would be time-consuming and resource-intensive. With incremental backups, however, only the new or modified files are copied, which drastically shortens backup windows and minimizes system downtime. This efficiency ensures that backups can be scheduled more frequently, reducing the risk of data loss due to unforeseen system failures or cyberattacks.

In the event of data corruption, hardware failure, or a cyberattack like ransomware, businesses need a reliable and up-to-date copy of their data to restore operations quickly. Incremental backups provide the flexibility to recover data from the most recent restore point while minimizing the risk of losing recent changes. Since they save time and storage, businesses are more likely to maintain frequent backups, ensuring that the most current data is always available if recovery is needed.

Finally, incremental backups offer a cost-effective solution for long-term data retention. Given that storage resources are often limited, saving only the data that has changed helps organizations optimize their storage infrastructure. This approach allows companies to maintain historical versions of files without filling up their storage systems. It also reduces the costs associated with cloud storage, where costs can add up fast.

At Washington Works, our BDR solution can really protect your business from data loss, downtime, and other situations. To learn more about data management strategies and disaster recovery, give our IT professionals a call today at 301-571-5040.