How to Build a Backup Strategy for Your Startup

01

Assess your data

First, you should assess your data and identify what you want to protect. This’ll usually be your critical data, such as customer and employee data, financial records, and any other data essential to the running of your business:

• prioritise certain types of financial and personal data to comply with GDPR and other data regulations.
• involve stakeholders, as they can highlight critical data unknown to your technical teams.
• consider data dependencies – is any of your data reliant on other data for functionality? If the answer is yes, both sets of data will need the same level of protection.

02

Decide the backup frequency

The next step is to decide how often you’ll backup your data. Will it be daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or less often? The answer to this will largely depend on how often your data changes. If it changes frequently or undergoes version control, it’ll require more frequent backups to prevent data loss. If it doesn’t change much, or is categorised as historical or infrequently accessed data, you might want to archive it to preserve its integrity and benefit from low storage costs.

03

Choose a storage solution

When choosing which storage solutions to adopt, many businesses use the best practice 3-2-1 approach: you keep 3 copies of your data (the original and 2 backup versions) on two separate storage solutions, with one copy stored off-site to protect it from cyberattacks, such as ransomware. At OVHcloud:

• you can back up your cloud-native application with automated Instance Backup,
• create another copy as an immutable Object Storage bucket,
• rsync your data to another Object Storage bucket in a distant location,
• create a cold copy with Cold Archive to store data offline.

04

Select a backup method

Next, you’ll need to decide which backup method suits your requirements – full, incremental, differential, or mirror. What you choose will depend on:

• how often your data changes,
• how often you’re performing backups,
• how easily you want to retrieve the data,
• what is the volume of data your storage solution can hold.

For example, choosing to perform a full or mirror backup every day will require a huge amount of storage space. It might be better for you to perform frequent incremental backups, which are fast, require much less storage space - and therefore costs you less.

05

Implement your backup strategy

It’s time to implement your backup strategy, but before you start, ensure it is clearly documented so everyone understands the processes, schedules, and people responsible. Then, perform your first backups. Schedule them regularly and monitor them to ensure effectiveness.

06

Test your backup strategy

• simulate real-life data loss incidents by intentionally corrupting or deleting your data,
• restore it following your backup strategy processes.

Testing your strategy is especially important whenever you make changes to your IT infrastructure, such as when you implement new software, hardware, or operating systems, as even a small change to your infrastructure can significantly affect your backup processes.