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Backup and Recovery Basics for Small Organizations
A plain-language guide to planning a backup strategy: what to copy, how often to copy it, where to keep the copies and how to confirm you can restore them.
Systems and Infrastructure
Backup and Recovery
Protecting data and restoring services after something goes wrong.
Building a Disaster Recovery Plan
The parts of a written disaster recovery plan: scope, priorities, roles, recovery steps, communication and testing, explained simply for small IT teams.
Business Continuity Versus Disaster Recovery
How business continuity and disaster recovery overlap and differ, with simple examples showing where each one starts, what it covers and who is involved.
Data Retention Schedules and Secure Deletion
How to decide how long to keep different kinds of data, write a retention schedule and dispose of information securely when the time comes.
Full, Incremental and Differential Backups Compared
How full, incremental and differential backups differ in speed, storage space and restore effort, with a simple hypothetical example to compare the three.
How to Test a Backup Before You Need It
Why untested backups are unreliable, and a practical routine for checking that your backups can actually be restored, from sample files to full system tests.
Protecting Backups From Ransomware
Why attackers target backups and how general measures such as isolation, immutability, separate credentials and testing make backups harder to destroy.
Recovery Time and Recovery Point Objectives
What recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) mean, how they set expectations for restoring service, and how to choose sensible targets.
The 3-2-1 Backup Rule Explained
What the widely cited 3-2-1 backup rule means: three copies, two kinds of media, one off site. Learn how to apply it, its limits and common variations.
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